In Defence of the Regional Category
Global’ has become the default ambition in professional recognition. For a great many candidates, it is the wrong one — and the scoreboard knows it.
Programme: MYRONYX Global Awards · myronyxglobal.com · Format: opinion column
There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has helped a colleague with an awards submission, when the conversation turns. The work is strong, the evidence is solid, the market is one country. And then somebody says: but shouldn’t we go for the international category? It sounds better.
It does sound better. That is the entire argument in its favour, and it is a bad one.
MYRONYX Global Awards runs a Regional Excellence (USA) category alongside its international ones — Client Experience Excellence, Technology & Innovation, Business & Leadership Excellence, Disruptive Innovation, Health & Wellness, the Golden Award for Innovation, Diversity & Inclusion Excellence, Sustainability & Impact. The existence of a regional route inside an international programme tends to be read as a consolation prize. I would argue it is the opposite: it is the category where a certain kind of excellent work can finally be judged on its own terms.
The category is a question, not a label
Every category is, functionally, a question a juror is instructed to ask. An international category asks whether a result travels. A regional category asks whether a result mattered where it happened. These are different questions, and a piece of work can answer one superbly and the other not at all.
Consider a clinic network that grows from four sites to seventeen across three states, becomes the largest independent operator in its segment by licensed capacity, and cuts average patient wait times from eleven days to three. That is serious work by any standard. Put it in an international category and a juror, quite reasonably, starts asking about cross-border adoption, multi-market users, replication elsewhere — because the MYRONYX matrix gives Scalability 12 per cent and Development Potential 10, and reads Industry Impact against a wider field. The answers will be thin, not because the work is weak but because the question does not fit it.
Move the same file to a regional category and every strength becomes legible: market position, state regulatory standing, domestic benchmarks, named local institutions, employment created. Nothing about the achievement changed. The comparison set did.
The dishonesty of upward framing
What actually happens when single-market work is dressed as global is that the submission starts hedging. Specifics get replaced by ambition. “The model is designed to be scalable internationally” appears, which is a sentence about intention rather than evidence. “Widely recognised” replaces “ranked first in the state register”.
Jurors read a great many submissions. They are unusually good at spotting the moment a document stops describing and starts implying — and the effect is corrosive, because a reader who catches one piece of inflation begins re-reading everything sceptically. Upward framing does not merely fail to gain points on scalability. It costs points on credibility in criteria that had nothing to do with geography.
Regional is not smaller. It is denser.
The prejudice underneath all of this is that regional means provincial. In most industries the reverse is closer to true. Winning a defined market means dealing with its regulators, its incumbents, its labour conditions and its distribution realities — operational problems that a thinly spread international presence often avoids entirely. Depth in one jurisdiction is a harder thing to fake than a list of countries with a sales contact in each.
There is also an audience argument. Professional recognition is read by people making decisions: procurement officers, partners, investors, candidates. For a business whose customers are domestic, a credible domestic recognition is more persuasive than an international title that its own market does not recognise. The signal is only useful if it reaches the people who buy.
When to go global — properly
None of this is an argument against international categories. It is an argument for entering them when the file supports them.
The test is simple and it is about evidence rather than ambition. Lay out the five strongest documents. If four of them are domestic — state filings, local contracts, national trade press — the evidence base is regional. If independent confirmation comes from more than one market, if a method has been replicated by others abroad, if adoption crosses borders, the international category is not a stretch; it is where the file belongs.
Ambition is a fine thing to have about the work. It is a poor thing to have about the category. The recognition that helps a career is the one a sceptical reader can check, and the fastest way to make a strong record look weak is to file it against the wrong question.
Categories and cycle parameters at MYRONYX Global Awards change between cycles; current information is published at myronyxglobal.com. This column reflects the author’s analysis of publicly available programme materials.
Programme: MYRONYX Global Awards · myronyxglobal.com · Format: opinion column
There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has helped a colleague with an awards submission, when the conversation turns. The work is strong, the evidence is solid, the market is one country. And then somebody says: but shouldn’t we go for the international category? It sounds better.
It does sound better. That is the entire argument in its favour, and it is a bad one.
MYRONYX Global Awards runs a Regional Excellence (USA) category alongside its international ones — Client Experience Excellence, Technology & Innovation, Business & Leadership Excellence, Disruptive Innovation, Health & Wellness, the Golden Award for Innovation, Diversity & Inclusion Excellence, Sustainability & Impact. The existence of a regional route inside an international programme tends to be read as a consolation prize. I would argue it is the opposite: it is the category where a certain kind of excellent work can finally be judged on its own terms.
The category is a question, not a label
Every category is, functionally, a question a juror is instructed to ask. An international category asks whether a result travels. A regional category asks whether a result mattered where it happened. These are different questions, and a piece of work can answer one superbly and the other not at all.
Consider a clinic network that grows from four sites to seventeen across three states, becomes the largest independent operator in its segment by licensed capacity, and cuts average patient wait times from eleven days to three. That is serious work by any standard. Put it in an international category and a juror, quite reasonably, starts asking about cross-border adoption, multi-market users, replication elsewhere — because the MYRONYX matrix gives Scalability 12 per cent and Development Potential 10, and reads Industry Impact against a wider field. The answers will be thin, not because the work is weak but because the question does not fit it.
Move the same file to a regional category and every strength becomes legible: market position, state regulatory standing, domestic benchmarks, named local institutions, employment created. Nothing about the achievement changed. The comparison set did.
The dishonesty of upward framing
What actually happens when single-market work is dressed as global is that the submission starts hedging. Specifics get replaced by ambition. “The model is designed to be scalable internationally” appears, which is a sentence about intention rather than evidence. “Widely recognised” replaces “ranked first in the state register”.
Jurors read a great many submissions. They are unusually good at spotting the moment a document stops describing and starts implying — and the effect is corrosive, because a reader who catches one piece of inflation begins re-reading everything sceptically. Upward framing does not merely fail to gain points on scalability. It costs points on credibility in criteria that had nothing to do with geography.
Regional is not smaller. It is denser.
The prejudice underneath all of this is that regional means provincial. In most industries the reverse is closer to true. Winning a defined market means dealing with its regulators, its incumbents, its labour conditions and its distribution realities — operational problems that a thinly spread international presence often avoids entirely. Depth in one jurisdiction is a harder thing to fake than a list of countries with a sales contact in each.
There is also an audience argument. Professional recognition is read by people making decisions: procurement officers, partners, investors, candidates. For a business whose customers are domestic, a credible domestic recognition is more persuasive than an international title that its own market does not recognise. The signal is only useful if it reaches the people who buy.
When to go global — properly
None of this is an argument against international categories. It is an argument for entering them when the file supports them.
The test is simple and it is about evidence rather than ambition. Lay out the five strongest documents. If four of them are domestic — state filings, local contracts, national trade press — the evidence base is regional. If independent confirmation comes from more than one market, if a method has been replicated by others abroad, if adoption crosses borders, the international category is not a stretch; it is where the file belongs.
Ambition is a fine thing to have about the work. It is a poor thing to have about the category. The recognition that helps a career is the one a sceptical reader can check, and the fastest way to make a strong record look weak is to file it against the wrong question.
Categories and cycle parameters at MYRONYX Global Awards change between cycles; current information is published at myronyxglobal.com. This column reflects the author’s analysis of publicly available programme materials.