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Is it better to have your headquarters in Chicago or Seattle? Should you open a regional office in Shanghai or Sydney? What advantages are there in having multiple manufacturing plants in eastern Europe and Asia? What are the people-related benefits and risks of operating a call center in Bangalore as opposed to Austin or Swindon? What factors inspire a Japanese company’s faith in the workforces of Indonesia or Taiwan – or a US firm’s faith in the workforces of Brazil or Mexico?

When it comes to deploying their workforce, companies face an unprecedented array of choices and challenges. Trade and economic barriers have fallen. Demographic shifts have opened up vast new labor markets around the world. Advances in education and technology have increased the portability of an ever-expanding range of jobs and skills.

This rapid expansion of workforce deployment options now provides many attractive new business opportunities – not just for reducing labor costs, but also for improving productivity, enhancing quality, boosting customer responsiveness, entering new markets, and strengthening talent and capabilities. But with the new opportunities come new risks. If a company makes the wrong choices, it could end up undermining its competitiveness and eroding its strategic advantages.

Of course, large companies from Europe, North America, and Asia have long had to grapple with dispersed operations, making difficult decisions about situating plants and offices in distant locales and shifting employees among various countries and continents. What’s different is that the scope and impact of those decisions have been magnified dramatically in recent years.

Indeed, the very idea of a “home country” is dissolving for many companies; their organizations, like their markets, are becoming truly global. Rather than relying on expatriates to staff overseas operations, companies today can draw on many sources of labor around the world. At the same time, we are seeing the emergence of stateless talent – a small number of highly skilled “citizens of the world” who are happy to relocate wherever their rewards will be greatest. To put it simply, the old rules of human capital management no longer apply.

Optimizing the global workforce is one of the greatest challenges facing companies today. Responding effectively requires:

In this paper, we address these three challenges, laying out a comprehensive framework that will help management teams ensure that they put the right people in the right places. We hope to equip you with a starting point for understanding the major and emerging “trade routes” for talent and how your company might approach labor deployment decisions.