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Business leaders now claim that geography is now irrelevant to their activities. Labor migrates freely, good do as well, and thus the lowest price for any good or service wins no matter where the bid comes from. Companies now spend millions on single orders over the internet, without a single person-to-person conversation. The only voices associated with most companies now are those of paid spokespeople and actors.

Are people skills even relevant, at a time when posting a job opening online will get you applications from around the world? The answer is a resounding "yes": at the end of the day, someone is still designing the products, the web sites, and the marketing material.

And that person needs a proper environment in which to perform his or her job, not "even if" but "especially if" that person was born and raised somewhere else. Immigrants and guest workers are as much members of the corporate world as anyone else, but their special issues and hardships need close attention to bring out the most in them, and that means mental coaching. Mental coaching is an excellent way of bringing someone from a different culture into the team 100%, and it is one of the most important functions of today's human resource management.

While mental coaches, such as Dr. John F. Murray, who developed "Mental Performance Index" for American football (and proceeded to help Vincent Spadea overcome a losing streak that was one of the longest in the history of tennis), might be associated with professional sports, outdoor sales-people, or CEO's, the truth is that mental coaching is relevant from the highest to the lowest rung of the corporate ladder.

It costs a company tens of thousands of dollars to hire and train even a mid-level employee. Given the level of investment required to bring people in, shouldn't you do everything you can to maximize their value? Mental coaches help most professional athletes, so why can't they be effective in aiding your business professionals?

While the world may well have become metaphorically "flat," it is still populated with human beings -- and human beings don't perform up to peak potential without training and intelligent management. Companies are fundamentally composed of people, something that is as true during the age of Bill Gates as it was during that or Rockefeller, the changes owing to the Internet notwithstanding.