Customer Reviews

Globality: Competing with Everyone from Everywhere for Everything

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Globality is an excellent book for corporate executives, business unit leaders, and entrepreneurs. If you are an investor or want to read about the culture of world business, this isn't going to be your cup of tea.

We are in the middle of the great business convergence, an event so epochal that it will be written about as one of the great turning points in world history over the next several hundred years. What's it all about? Simply, every organization will complete with virtually every other organization on the planet. In the process, the dominant companies of the 21st century will be built.

In Globality, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) partners Harold Sirkin, James Hemerling, and Arindam Bhattacharya take the view primarily from enterprises founded in China, India, Brazil, and Mexico to show how those with the fewest resources, least skills, but lowest costs, are building important global positions in major industries. I compared this writing to what BCG founder Bruce D. Henderson used to write in the 1960s about Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese companies being poised to deflate profits for companies in the U.S. and Europe, and I was pleased to see that Globality is much more articulate, better defined, and easier to understand.

Although the book is very much about the evidence brought by the challengers, the information is presented neutrally in terms of describing opportunities available for anyone. In addition, there are specific suggestions for what well established companies in developed countries might do to best take advantage of these opportunities.

For me, the best parts were the case histories of companies in China and India that I don't know much about. You'll find many interesting stories.

In terms of analyzing the opportunities, the major themes are:

(1) Minding the Cost Gap

(2) Growing Human Capabilities

(3) Reaching Deeper into Markets

(4) Geographically Pinpointing Resources and Capabilities

(5) Thinking Big

(6) Acting Fast

(7) Getting Help from Outside

(8) Innovating the Business Model

(9) Embracing Global Diversity

(10) Being Prepared to Attack Everywhere and Be Attacked from Everywhere

The chapter titles in the book aren't quite this clear. You'll have to read the material to grasp the key concepts, but you'll get it.

I liked that the book has strategic, organizational, and tactical dimensions. If you want to get a quick look at the overall themes, head to page 239 to read the Nokia story and to page 249 to read the Emerson story.

With regard to the title, Harold Sirkin, James Hemerling, and Arindam Bhattacharya explain that "globality [is] the name for a new and different reality in which we'll all be competing with everyone, from everywhere, for everything." In a global business environment that Thomas Friedman characterizes as having become "flat," it is also possible (albeit theoretically) for companies to forge a strategic alliance with anyone, anywhere. They go on to suggest that as a new era emerges, "we call it globality, a different kind of environment, in which business flows in every direction. Companies have no centers. The idea of foreignness is foreign. Commerce swirls and market dominance shifts. Western business orthodoxy entwines with eastern business philosophy and creates a whole new mind-set that embraces profit and competition as well as sustainability and collaboration. Globality is a blockbuster new script - action, drama, suspense, and road picture all packed into one - with a sprawling cast of characters and locations in every corner of the world."

Sirkin, Hemerling, and Bhattacharya explain why and how a "tsunami" wave of competition from global challengers (i.e. rapidly developing companies) has risen up and challenged established players, what they call "incumbents." In fact, developed companies now find themselves struggling to compete successfully in terms of cost differentials; "growing people" and then positioning them in proper alignment; market penetration; "pinpointing" (i.e. connecting with customers, distributing complexity, and reinventing the business model); rapid growth (by scaling up, building brands, filling capability gaps, and bartering); innovating with ingenuity; and embracing "manyness" (i.e. many countries, economies, markets, locations, and facilities but no centers, no home markets, no foreignness, or hierarchy of location). New mind-sets are needed if incumbents are to respond effectively to these and other challenges.

Each of the co-authors is a senior-level executive with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and, together, they have dozens of years of close association and direct involvement with a number of companies - and have accumulated extensive research data on many other companies - among the "BCG Challenger 100." Thirty-four of these companies provide industrial goods, 17 are resource extractors, 14 make consumer durables, another 14 offer food, beverage, and cosmetic products, four make technical equipment. The remaining 17 operate in a wide variety of fields that include pharmaceuticals, mobile communication services, shipping, and infrastructure. For me, the most important material in this book is provided as the co-authors examine specific challenger companies and suggest what lessons can be learned from their initiatives. They include BYD, Johnson Electric, Wipro, ICICI Bank, Embraer, Barat Forge, Cipla, Tata Consulting Services, and Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M). As I read about them, I was reminded of Jack Welch's remarks during a GE annual meeting years ago when he explained the competitive advantages of such challenger companies:

"For one, they communicate better. Without the din and prattle of bureaucracy, people listen as well as talk; and since there are fewer of them they generally know and understand each other. Second, small companies move faster. They know the penalties for hesitation in the marketplace. Third, in small companies, with fewer layers and less camouflage, the leaders show up very clearly on the screen. Their performance and its impact are clear to everyone. And, finally, smaller companies waste less. They spend less time in endless reviews and approvals and politics and paper drills. They have fewer people; therefore they can only do the important things. Their people are free to direct their energy and attention toward the marketplace rather than fighting bureaucracy." Welch could well have been describing the mind-sets at ZTE, a challenger that competes successfully with incumbents that include Ericsson, Nokia, Alcatel, Siemens, and Motorola. Ten thousand of its 31,000 employees are engineers and their average age is 30. Like so many other challenger companies, ZTE is outgrowing the imitation stage, investing heavily in 14 research and development centers in China, the U.S. India, France, and Sweden. Its leaders are determined to participate in global standard setting, with ZTE having already applied for more than 5,000 national and international patents. If the cycle continues, ZTE will eventually become an incumbent and then struggle to compete successfully with challengers who may not even be in business today.

When concluding their book, Sirkin, Hemerling, and Bhattacharya assert (and I wholly agree) that however much the global business community has changed and will continue to change, the measures of success will remain essentially the same. Business leaders will continue to think about their place in the world, about sustainability and scarce resources. Those the co-authors interviewed "always talk about their dreams. They speak about people they have known, in their factories and boardrooms, retail outlets, and warehouses. They talk about their companies as if they were families. Above all, they say they want their personal and professional lives to be meaningful and rich journeys. They want to build something. And they want it to endure."

Meanwhile, the "tsunami" continues to surge....

Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out Friedman's aforementioned The World Is Flat 3.0 and The Quest for Global Dominance by Anil K. Gupta, Vijay Govindarajan, and Haiyan Wang as well as Victor Fung, William Fung, and Yoram (Jerry) Wind's Competing in a Flat World, C.K. Prahalad's The Borderless World (Revised Edition) and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Kenichi Ohmae's The Next Global Stage, and Vijay Mahajan and Kamini Banga's The 86 Percent Solution.

Globality describes the next phase of globalization and gives advise for how businesses should deal with it. In the authors view the first phase of globalization was companies building factories overseas and outsourcing manufacturing and labor intensive work to low cost countries in the developing world. The "Globality" phase will see companies from both the developed countries and the developing countries competing as peers. There is no longer a lack of talent in the developing countries.

In this new global economy companies must deal with seven "struggles" according to the authors. They are: minding the cost gap; growing people; reaching deep into markets; pinpointing; thinking big, acting fast, going outside; innovating with ingenuity and embracing manyness. Each of these topics makes up a chapter and is elucidated with examples and anecdotes. While each struggle was explained by itself, they did not seem to hang together as a coherent whole.

The authors are consultants at the The Boston Consulting Group; they were clearly writing for clients or potential clients. The text offers several examples of companies which had embraced the particular idea under discussion and a description of how they had benefited from it.

Of course we don't see examples of companies which had tried these ideas and not had success from them. Nor do we see companies that were successful with different strategies. What else had the companies that they profile tried before they came to these ideas? We would have learned a lot more from seeing these different attempts and out comes. Structuring the book as a list of companies that had succeeded by using the authors ideas makes it seem like a long advertisement, not a book that was intended to study a topic, or report on a phenomena.

The advertising nature of the book aside, it was well written and offered and intelligent view of an important topic.

What a great book. Easy to read. Compelling messages. It's power is in the principles: Now is the time to be ready for global competition. Now is the time to be ready to take advantage of global markets. Now is the time to talk and deal to get strength, innovation, ideas. Sirkin, Hemerling and Bhattacharya speak with a fine, strong voice. Wow.

The authors of Globality have captured well what we are just now beginning to recognize in US corporations. For the last 20 years, globalization has symbolized the outpost approach American corporations have adopted to opening markets outside the US, while remaining stateside centric in our planning and execution. Globality is a sharp reminder that those markets are not just open, but thriving so well that American business must recognize the need to incorporate the issues, challenges, and opportunities into their strategic planning. Now is the time to put aside our pride, and learn the strategies and tactics that given our global neighbors a competitive edge. Most of all, we must recognize the risk of not doing so.

This book is a must for anyone competing in the rapidly changing global environment. The authors provide story after story of current companies creating exceptional growth and value in some of the previously least expected places in the world. It is humbling to recognize how much business success is occuring using many nontraditional and diverse business strategies. There is so much to be learned from these companies and countries. The authors provide a vivid picture of why that learning is so needed if one expects to compete. The book does not leave the reader without suggesting ways companies can join the success.

this book is reviewing the development process of companies started in emerging countries until they become global. Initial competitive advantages as well as the acquisition of strategic features are described. This book is providing a flavour of the necessary ambition of the traditional western company in order to sustain upcoming market competition.

Very interesting content, from folks who know what they're talking about. The biggest shame is that the book has become somewhat dated since the 2008 edition. Still, very entertaining and relevant material.

Any book that drives home the point how the global market is real is an educational tool. Although we all compete with the world for our jobs and goods on a daily basis, many of us still don't understand what has happened. This was an incredible reiteration of how times have changed.

Globalization has reached an inflexion point where the size and role of Rapidly Developing Economies (RDEs) in the global economy is changing the rules of the game. The authors analyze this phenomenon from a business and strategic perspective of "Incumbents" ( big fortune 500+ companies primarily belonging to the developed nations) and the "Challengers" who are the flagship companies of the Rapidly developing Economies like China, India, Brazil, Mexico and Russia, to name a few.

The analogy of "Incumbents vs. Challengers" in this book reminds me of another interesting framework, "The Innovator's Dilemma" of Prof Clayton Christensen. The Incumbents tend to move up the value chain, overshooting market needs, by chasing high end customers. On the other hand, Challengers disrupt the game by just meeting the customer needs on a given functionality, but open up a new dimension of competition, taking the Incumbents by surprise. The Incumbents move up further, ceding territory at "the bottom", and when this continues, suddenly, the Incumbents have no further space to move. The proverbial camel has dislodged the Arab from his tent!

Prof C.K.Prahalad's path breaking book "Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" brought out the need for large multinational companies to strategize and execute very differently to succeed in BOP markets. The center of gravity of the global economy is slowly, but surely shifting towards these markets.

This book, to some extent is an extension of the above concepts. Not only do the Challengers do very well on their home turf but are very rapidly moving up into the developed markets, once the undisputed and unchallenged preserve of the Incumbents.

There are several examples of how the Challengers are grabbing every possible opportunity, thinking and acting differently and moving at a pace that the Incumbents are finding hard to cope with. Case studies from India and China across industry verticals including manufacturing, consumer products, steel, services and even pharmaceuticals, make this book a great read. The Challengers have successfully leveraged the initial cost arbitrage advantage to move up the value chain across geographies.

There is also ample advice for Incumbents to realign and reengineer themselves to ensure success in the new era. Conventional concepts of standard global processes should give way to locally adaptable agile practices, and the mindset of "world wide headquarters" should be replaced by "global polycentricism", according to the authors.

Globality, where once should compete with everyone from everywhere for everything, needs a different global value chain perspective and an ability to pinpoint the vital resources and competencies to do business differently, with speed, customer focus and ability to adapt and change. As of now the advantage, it appears, is with the Challengers who do not carry any baggage of the past.

Highly recommended.