On the final day of Mobility Conference Week 2014, Fredrik Härén, an author and speaker on business creativity, offered delegates a view on what it means to be a truly global company in today’s world where national borders are becoming ever less important.

Business needs to have a global perspective, he said, and be ready for rapid transformations in their industry. We need to be able to both ‘see and seize change’. For an idea to come to fruition you need people to take existing knowledge and information, and combine both in a creative way. FIA Automobile Clubs have a wealth of knowledge, built up over 100 years, Härén said, and this information has only grown as more and more information online has become available.

Most important is to be ready for the moment of change, he said. 15 years ago, everyone believed that we would make the transition from books to ebooks. But it was not until the last 18 months that the change came, and in the end it was not a shift from books to ebooks, we went straight from books to facebook.

Today we have a global divide. Companies have changed – they are now either Multi-National Companies (MNC) or ‘Truly Global Companies’ (TGC). A MNC comes from a country, but you cannot be an American TGC. Härén noted though that today there are many companies which are between the two. Take for example Apple which would always say it is an American company and yet it pays its tax in Ireland.

We are becoming ever more connected across countries. For Härén it is imperative that we start thinking and acting in a way that reflects that reality – we need to move to a 21st Century point of view.

And while up until now most companies have been played on national links, using them to strengthen their brand, companies are now increasingly moving towards creating a global identity.

Global business is not the Olympics. It is not a competition between national companies. A global business is much more like F1, he said, where you have a mix of teams made up of engineers, teams, owners, sponsors, etc from different nations competing in cities across the world. FIA Automobile Clubs do not need to be one global company, but they do need to start thinking of providing global services, according to Härén. Because if someone else goes global first, it is likely there will be problems ahead.