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What 'global' really means
Globality: Competing with Everyone From Everywhere for Everything
by Harold L. Sirkin, James W. Hemerling and Arindam K. Bhattacharya Business Plus. 304 pp. $26.99
By Cecil Johnson
The late and widely adored mid-20th-century comedian Jimmy Durante, aka "The Snoz," employed a tag line that encapsulates the central theme of this early-21st-century look at how the planet-wide economic order now works. Whenever someone provided additional commentary to one of his jokes, the gravelly throated jokester would say: "Everybody wants to get into the act." That is the continual refrain of Boston Consulting Group consultants Harold L. Sirkin, James W. Hemerling and Arindam K. Bhattacharya in their wide-ranging look at international business, Globality. They present a world of international economic stages upon which companies from the developed world and the developing world are competing for the attention of the same audiences. They call that "competing with everyone from everywhere for everything." The phenomenon they describe transcends what is now commonly referred to as globalization, a term that by and large still conjures up visions of a regime of international trade overwhelmingly dominated by large companies in the United States, Western Europe and Japan. The BCG consultants refer to those companies from the developed world as incumbents. In going global, primarily to take advantage of abundant supplies of cheaper labor in such places as China, India, Eastern Europe, Mexico and other parts of Latin America, those incumbents contributed to the growth of major competitors in those regions. The authors refer to those emerging developing world business behemoths as challengers, who are no longer merely providers of cheaply produced products for the incumbents to ship back for sale in their homes. Sirkin, Hemerling and Bhattacharya spent half a decade researching more than 3,000 challenger companies around the globe that are now diversifying, innovating and expanding their reach into the production and marketing domain markets of the incumbents. Tracing this trend, the authors refer to the early 1900s, when the United States mounted its challenge against the dominance of European manufacturers, through the 1970s, which saw the Japanese surge into the U.S. market, the challenger companies of Mexico in the 1980s, and the rise of Korea in the 1990s. They maintain that the new wave of challengers is much greater and will be more earthshaking than any previous ones: "This one is more like a tsunami - a series of low, powerful waves caused by an undersea disruption that crash against the shore and surge far inland - than the single, sharp crest of a tidal wave." Globality fittingly focuses heavily on China and India because of the massive populations of those countries, their super-abundances of low-cost labor, their huge domestic markets, and their abundant natural resources. But they also take into account the populations and comparative advantages of other countries in the developing world. "Add in 200 million Brazilians, 143 million Russians, 110 million Mexicans, and 150 million eastern Europeans and you have a total of three billion people in the rapidly developing economies," the consultants write. But that, they add, does not even account for the hundreds of millions of people in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Among the companies underscored in Globality are Brazil's Embraer, the world's third-largest aerospace manufacturer; China's Baosteel, Lenovo (computers) and Johnson Electric; India's automotive equipment giants Bharat Forge, Tata Motors and Mahindra and Mahidra, as well as its major technology companies, Infosys Technologies, Satyam Computer Services and Wipro Technologies; Mexico's cement and building materials giant Cemex; Russia's fossil fuels mammoths Gazprom and Lukoil and Turkey's Vestel, which specializes in consumer electronics. Globality is not just a view-with-alarm book. In telling the story of the emerging challenger companies, the authors' primary focus is upon showing how the challengers are achieving their successes, and what incumbents must do to avoid being swamped by the tsunami. This book is a must-read for leaders of companies in the developed world who want to get into the globality act and stay in it.
Cecil Johnson is a free-lance reviewer. He can be reached at linden35swbell.net.
by Harold L. Sirkin, James W. Hemerling and Arindam K. Bhattacharya Business Plus. 304 pp. $26.99
By Cecil Johnson
The late and widely adored mid-20th-century comedian Jimmy Durante, aka "The Snoz," employed a tag line that encapsulates the central theme of this early-21st-century look at how the planet-wide economic order now works. Whenever someone provided additional commentary to one of his jokes, the gravelly throated jokester would say: "Everybody wants to get into the act." That is the continual refrain of Boston Consulting Group consultants Harold L. Sirkin, James W. Hemerling and Arindam K. Bhattacharya in their wide-ranging look at international business, Globality. They present a world of international economic stages upon which companies from the developed world and the developing world are competing for the attention of the same audiences. They call that "competing with everyone from everywhere for everything." The phenomenon they describe transcends what is now commonly referred to as globalization, a term that by and large still conjures up visions of a regime of international trade overwhelmingly dominated by large companies in the United States, Western Europe and Japan. The BCG consultants refer to those companies from the developed world as incumbents. In going global, primarily to take advantage of abundant supplies of cheaper labor in such places as China, India, Eastern Europe, Mexico and other parts of Latin America, those incumbents contributed to the growth of major competitors in those regions. The authors refer to those emerging developing world business behemoths as challengers, who are no longer merely providers of cheaply produced products for the incumbents to ship back for sale in their homes. Sirkin, Hemerling and Bhattacharya spent half a decade researching more than 3,000 challenger companies around the globe that are now diversifying, innovating and expanding their reach into the production and marketing domain markets of the incumbents. Tracing this trend, the authors refer to the early 1900s, when the United States mounted its challenge against the dominance of European manufacturers, through the 1970s, which saw the Japanese surge into the U.S. market, the challenger companies of Mexico in the 1980s, and the rise of Korea in the 1990s. They maintain that the new wave of challengers is much greater and will be more earthshaking than any previous ones: "This one is more like a tsunami - a series of low, powerful waves caused by an undersea disruption that crash against the shore and surge far inland - than the single, sharp crest of a tidal wave." Globality fittingly focuses heavily on China and India because of the massive populations of those countries, their super-abundances of low-cost labor, their huge domestic markets, and their abundant natural resources. But they also take into account the populations and comparative advantages of other countries in the developing world. "Add in 200 million Brazilians, 143 million Russians, 110 million Mexicans, and 150 million eastern Europeans and you have a total of three billion people in the rapidly developing economies," the consultants write. But that, they add, does not even account for the hundreds of millions of people in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Among the companies underscored in Globality are Brazil's Embraer, the world's third-largest aerospace manufacturer; China's Baosteel, Lenovo (computers) and Johnson Electric; India's automotive equipment giants Bharat Forge, Tata Motors and Mahindra and Mahidra, as well as its major technology companies, Infosys Technologies, Satyam Computer Services and Wipro Technologies; Mexico's cement and building materials giant Cemex; Russia's fossil fuels mammoths Gazprom and Lukoil and Turkey's Vestel, which specializes in consumer electronics. Globality is not just a view-with-alarm book. In telling the story of the emerging challenger companies, the authors' primary focus is upon showing how the challengers are achieving their successes, and what incumbents must do to avoid being swamped by the tsunami. This book is a must-read for leaders of companies in the developed world who want to get into the globality act and stay in it.
Cecil Johnson is a free-lance reviewer. He can be reached at linden35swbell.net.
