Even if your firm has a healthy employee base and a strong balance sheet, chances are good that it’s about to face a significant shortage of qualified managers. I reached that conclusion in 2007, after working with Nitin Nohria, the current dean of Harvard Business School, and colleagues at the executive search firm Egon Zehnder to gauge the effects of three factors – globalization, demographics, and leadership pipelines – on competition for senior talent in large organizations. We studied 47 companies, spanning all major sectors and geographies. The results were dire: Only 15% of the firms in the Americas and Asia, and less than a third of those in Europe, had enough people primed to lead them into the future. New survey and research data we have compiled show that the situation has grown even worse.