China and India have begun hiring far more people in the U.S. and Europe. A recent IBM survey of more than 700 chief human resource officers and executives from 61 countries found that almost half of Indian companies and more than a third of Chinese firms said they were going to increase the number of employees they have in North America.

The logic is simple: It's all about expansion. Coming out of the global economic downturn, companies in China, India and other developing countries are eyeing North America and Europe as targets for new growth.

We can no longer look at emerging countries as just markets for American and European companies or cheap sources of labor for products. Companies there are now competing to sell their products and services to consumers around the world, becoming truly global and providing new employment opportunities outside their home countries. This will radically change how companies do business--and how they must recruit and manage leadership and employees.

With new rivals battling around the world, competition will grow more intense than ever. Leadership that can thrive in this increasingly uncertain world, where ambiguity and change are a given, will be at a premium. But the rising competition will also make it harder to find and keep such nimble leadership.

Also, businesses will have less room for error as they launch new services and products, respond to changes in demand and expand their markets. Smart management of a truly global workforce will be key.

Companies will need to cultivate leaders who can tackle this new age of global competition. That doesn't mean just effective managers; it means creative leaders who can think across borders, who can come up with new ways of communicating and collaborating that inspire and connect employees around the world. Companies will need managers who can anticipate and thrive on change in a world where competitors pop up all over, not just react.

Executives at only a third of the companies we talked to said they're good at picking out such creative leaders. Traditional leadership programs tend to perpetuate an organization's existing structures, but that won't cut it when we're talking about the challenge of managing a borderless workforce that's always in flux.

Just as crucial as cultivating creative leaders is making sure that the right people do the right jobs in the right places. Managing a workforce becomes daunting as you spread your employees around the world and hire from different cultures. It gets even tougher as you use more outsourcing and part-time workers in order to be more flexible.

Here again, our research shows that companies just aren't prepared. Only 35% of human resource officers say they can globally deploy people effectively. Just 31% think their companies are effective at rapidly developing new skills.

How can we get smarter about leadership? If we're facing a new kind of global competition in which companies from the U.S., Europe, India, and China all vie for the same talent and the same markets, how can we come out ahead?

Technology helped create this new borderless world. Technology can also help companies craft strategies for developing innovative future leaders, and for managing more employees across a broader span of time zones, countries and backgrounds. Analytics can pinpoint not only where top performers are located but what makes them stand out from their peers around the world. It can help identify employees, wherever they may be, who have specific expertise a company needs to deploy right now. Yet companies rarely use analytics to plan for the future, as good as they may be at using its data to look backward to identify trends.

Many of the companies whose executives we spoke with don't have the infrastructure to analyze the kinds of skills and capabilities their workers have. They can't model potential talent shortages or monitor talent supply and demand.

We all know that employees are our most important asset. It's up to us to decide how we make the most of them--and how they help propel our organizations as we face stepped up competition.