(FORTUNE Magazine) – A couple of years ago a pack of top dogs from the Conference Board stopped by to chew on ideas. At one point I asked what the business research group's member companies were worried or confused about--what kept them up at night, what they wanted to learn more about. One of our visitors said this: Companies were confused about globalization. They all were expanding internationally, all--or nearly all--seeking to "go global," but they weren't sure what that meant. Worse, they didn't know how to judge whether they were doing it right and, therefore, were nagged by fear they were doing it wrong.

Not that doubt slowed them down. Cats still packs 'em in on Broadway; heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the U.S.; and globalization continues to be the biggest business trend going, something easy to forget because it's had such a long run. On transoceanic aircraft, business-class cabins have expanded almost to the size of their occupants' egos. The Internet has made worldwide communication richer, faster, cheaper, and more incessant than anyone could have imagined just five years ago--when globalization was already old hat. Never before in history has there been such a spree of intercontinental mergers and acquisitions--not just monstrous couplings like Daimler and Chrysler, British Petroleum and Amoco, Deutsche Bank and Bankers Trust, but scores upon scores of more modest deals, so that cross-border M&A now accounts for more than half of all new foreign direct investment worldwide. For example, in Britain, privatization created 14 regional electricity companies, seven of which were subsequently bought by American companies. (Two have since been sold again, one to a British and the other to a French company.) Fly 12 time zones from New York to Singapore, turn right outside the Holiday Inn Royal Crowne Plaza hotel, walk a block to Orchard Road, and behold a Burger King, a Borders, a Starbucks, and every designer from Armani to Zegna.

Yet the disquiet persists; if anything, it's grown louder. Says consultant Keith Ferrazi, a partner at Deloitte & Touche: "This is what CEOs tell me--privately, not in front of people: I have globalized this company out of necessity and because it was the right thing to do, and in the last couple of years it's bitten me in the ass." If less were at stake, it would be refreshing, Ferrazi adds, to see CEOs fess up to such uncertainty.

This affliction of ignorance and something like fear--how do I know we're doing it right?--affects everybody, not just the brass. Managers at every level must learn how to think about such issues as, say, using local suppliers or global ones, or whether to adopt, adapt, or abjure the parent company's brand-management strategy. Investors who loved Coca-Cola for its Asian fizz have to decide what to do about Asia's fizzle. Ambitious thirtysomethings know that their companies insist that candidates for top jobs have international experience--but also know that in most cases an overseas assignment still means out of sight, out of mind, out of contention. American executives have to learn how to deal with German workers legally entitled to board representation, and German executives have to learn how to deal with American pension funds that want them to pay more attention to shareholders (who are usually retired workers) and less to the active workers on their boards.

For all the talk and action about globalization, what's missing is a way to think about it--a vocabulary, an armature, a structure, a logic, even a checklist that allows managers to sort through the decisions and investments they have made and need to make. Ferrazi is leading a group--I almost typed "grope," not altogether wrongly--that is designing that missing piece. As this column goes to press, he is overseeing the preparation of the first year's report of a multiyear study called "Innovative Leaders in Globalization," sponsored by the World Economic Forum and Deloitte & Touche. The report will be offered at the forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, which starts on Jan. 27, and it's important enough for this to be the first of two columns about its findings.

The study's purposes: to define what it means to be a global company, so that leaders, managers, and investors can analyze and measure companies better; to propose ways to measure success; and to build a knowledge base of stories and innovative ideas--even best practices--that show how companies make globalization work. Since launching the program at Davos last year, Ferrazi and his team have surveyed some 2,000 CEOs; held discussions with an advisory CEO council that comprises Goran Lindhal of Asea Brown Boveri, Lew Platt of Hewlett-Packard, Chad Holliday of Du Pont, and Robert Kuijpers of DHL Worldwide; and picked the brains of an advisory council whose members included C.K. Prahalad of the University of Michigan, Chris Bartlett and Bob Hayes of Harvard, and lawyer Ira Millstein. (I'm on this council too.)

The first-year results are a lot more impressive than they are showy--as foundations should be, the better to bear superstructures. One accomplishment was to agree that the ultimate measure of success in globalization must be shareholder value. That's not as easy a decision as one might think. First, there are competing claims. Most Americans are used to the notion that a company's first and last duty is to its shareholders. Not so elsewhere, where other stakeholders may get not just lip service but legal authority--witness those worker representatives on German boards. A global company will of necessity face those competing claims--but they are not why it decides to globalize. The threshold question--should we go global at all?--can be answered only in terms of creating and defending wealth; so that's how to keep score. Many companies have no business leaving home--great Parisian restaurants, many retailers (even large ones), lots of financial institutions.

Hewing to shareholder value as the ultimate measure of successful globalization also helps avoid a subtle, dangerous distraction: the risk of measuring means but ignoring ends. How many nations' flags fly in the lobby at world headquarters? Too many, if an obsession with covering the globe destroys wealth. DHL Worldwide, which delivers packages, believes that an indicator of its success will be that its human and financial capital is invested in rough proportion to the size of the economy in every market where it wishes to compete. That makes sense--for DHL. But it is a ridiculous aim for a company that needs huge factories or that depends on natural resources that are unequally salted around the globe. The only measure companies can sensibly use, then, is this: Is our global strategy the best means to the end of creating wealth in our business?

And wealth over time, from a global perspective. Only a couple of years ago markets loved companies that invested in Asia; now those investments are penalized. Conversely, Asian companies that invested in the West are today rewarded. Tomorrow, who knows? These shoes have a way of moving from one foot to another.

The strategic question is whether they fit in the first place. The operational question is how well a company responds to change. As C.K. Prahalad notes: "Wealth creation is not an issue to debate. Sometimes globalization brings a premium, sometimes a negative. The real measure is how fast a company can recover from crises, predictable or unpredictable."

Of course, "Give us time" is the traditional chant of the lost CEO. Japanese and European companies have long criticized Americans for short-termism. A big finding of the World Economic Forum study is that capital markets are themselves globalizing--in the past decade the number of non-U.S. listings on the New York Stock Exchange has increased 300%. As a result, investors are converging on a standard that's most like the one Anglophones are used to: impatient but not stupid.

Next: a framework for analyzing global operations