Customer Reviews

World Out of Balance: Navigating Global Risks to Seize Competitive Advantage

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The best thing about this book is that serves as a refresher course on integrating risks into business strategy in the first quarter of the twenty first century. Business environment undergoes dramatic changes driven by macro economic and political factors and hence it is important to redefine the strategic maps continuously. The author has listed the five most important factors - Globalization, Demographics, Consumption patterns, Natural Resources and Environment, Regulation and Activism that play a significant role in shaping business success. One chapter is devoted to each of these factors. Frankly, I did not find anything original in any of these. However each chapter is a very good summary on the topic which otherwise need a separate book for each. MBA students will be glad to hear this.

Different scenarios are discussed under each chapter and the impact of these on business is discussed. Honestly, this treatment is grossly inadequate. A good overview emerges at the end but again it lacks depth.

The book is not industry specific and to that extent is balanced. I recommend further detailing in another book by the author so that we can put concepts into practice. As pointed out rightly in the book, this is the `why' of the topic. We need also to understand the `how' of implementation.

This book is a fascinating and useful guide to the challenges that companies face in today's networked global economy. Over the past few decades, corporations have become increasingly dependent on global networks of suppliers and customers. Yet at the same time, the political and economic environment has become increasingly hard to predict. In order to survive in this rapidly changing world, it is critical that businesses understand global trends and the risks and opportunities they imply. This book shows you how to do just that.

The book is a great way to get up to speed quickly on the main trends that are shaping global politics and economics. But it also presents a simple yet powerful framework for understanding how these trends might affect your business-either positively or negatively. It not only describes the key macro trends, it also analyzes them for their potential impact on business strategies.

The discussion begins with six drivers that are shaping the global environment: technology, globalization, demographics, consumers, the environment and regulation. There is a chapter on each driver summarizing the key trends and illustrated with fascinating and useful facts. There are new ways of looking at familiar issues-like the demographics of aging in developed and developing countries-and surprising discussions of less familiar topics-such as the political consequences of water scarcity around the world.

After laying out the drivers, Laudicina brings them together to build three scenarios for how the world might change over the next few decades. Laudicina also describes a number of low-probability, high-impact "wild card" events that could change all of the rules of the game.

The final chapter offers a practical methodology for mapping your own organization's risk profile so that you can begin to leverage the drivers and scenarios to better understand the specific risks and opportunities that your company faces. Avoiding the typical checklist approach to risk management, it presents a process to engage all levels of your organization in thinking strategically about the future of the company in a changing world.

Too many businesses of every size and type get so focused on managing their day-to-day operations that they lose sight of external conditions that may have a dramatic impact on the very existence of their organization. In the book titled - "World Out of Balance" - author Paul A. Laudicina, provides a practical structure intended to help any organization adapt to the ongoing evolution of the global business environment while making sense of both the seismic and subtle shifts that occur. Soundview recommends this book because Laudicina identifies five trackable drivers of change that virtually anyone can keep an eye on including: globalization trends, demographics, the new consumer, natural resources and the environment, as well as regulation and activism. Bring some balance to your business with "World Out of Balance."

This book has substance. It is more relevant and valuable than anything out of the Audit & Assurance (read "Big 4") Enterprise Risk Management community.

The message is simple: the world has changed. Business and government models must also adapt and change. It addresses transnational threats, vulnerabilities and consequences...in a substantive manner, i.e. actually providing content information and informed opinion. That is to be expected from a top tier strategy firm.

Firms with the sophistication of A.T. Kearney know that understanding comes before strategy, and that's what the authors are trying to do in this book. The book not only discusses the proverbial "dots" it suggests different ways they may be connected. So, it does a good job of fulfilling the first two duties of science: describe and explain. The book should have been released in late 2007 or 2008. It would have done better and helped raise the awareness of business and government leaders as to a new risk/threat calculus.

It uses scenarios to introduce "situational awareness." Not especially innovative, but it is a start. But awareness without the requsite tools usually means that you die enlightened.

And you see, that's the problem. Management consultants are recruited from top tier "B" Schools; and they focus almost exclusively on deterministic and linear solutions applied at or near equilibrium.

Those solutions just do not hack it in a globalized world. The old tools and paradigms exemplified by stability and predict-then-act assumptions and models are inappropriate for today's unstable, non-linear, environments exhibiting high degrees of uncertainty and complexity.
Buy the book. You're getting off cheap at the price.

Perhaps Laudicina's next book will take us into that space.

Author Paul A. Laudicina invites you to, "Come and look into my crystal ball!" His book, largely based on the research and insights of A.T. Kearney's prestigious Global Business Policy Council, casts a wide net of future possibilities. After you put it down, you may feel its conclusions could best be summarized with a shrug and a muttered, "Who knows?" To say that five factors - globalization, demographics, consumers' needs, natural resource limitations, and governmental regulation - will be the primary influences on future world markets is well and good, but what will their impact be? Given the variety of future scenarios here, you may be tempted to resort to John Maynard Keynes' attitude that, "In the long run, we're all dead." Be that as it may, Laudicina proves that any astute portrayal of future possibilities must reflect multiple, complex uncertainties. In this rapidly changing world, companies have a profound need to consider what may lie ahead. This volume should provide substantial assistance. We strongly recommend it to corporate leaders, business prognosticators and futurists of every ilk.

First of all I have partially enjoyed reading this book but some of the information given-especially about Non-US regions- are wrong..I have disappointed since it was so easy to reach those information even through Wikipedia...If you know the actual numbers it doesn't make sense to read those parts of the book..........

Paul A Laudicina performs an analysis of globalizing trends in business. He draws an understandable picture of the international character of the world economy and moves us form "multinational" to global in understanding the current business patterns of the 200s. The state of culture and economy worldwide is analyzed.

This analysis, however, is invitingly written in narrative style, with quick-moving stories of specific situations and events. This book is not a compendium of facts, statistics and demographics. But as you are reading this engaging volume, you are getting all that as well.

The ethnic and linguistic characteristic of world migration and market changes are well laid out here. I especially liked Chapter 3, dealing with the effects of ethnic worldview and culture on expectations and preferences. He provides his usual pertinent and insightful examples to show how products and advertising for them must meet cultural values and worldview norms, names, shapes and sizes carry moral values or social implications.

Laudicina analyzes 5 "drivers" of the global business environment. In the final chapter, he combines these to make projections of various scenarios that could arise out of the factors in our current global situation.

Laudicina is addressing the business community. But his incisive analyses and practical; suggestions will be helpful to anyone engaged in cross-cultural communication. It is too easy to overlook the importance of worldview differences in any international setting. Even in diplomatic circles, the common focus is on social aspects, not the decision-making aspects.

Laudicina raises our awareness here of the deep-level processes of decision-making that make cross-cultural communication so precarious. Anyone dealing with people of other cultures in some manner that intends to lead to a cultural change, such as business management structures, marketing and purchasing patterns, new products or anything affecting lifestyle changes, must be aware of how the target culture makes decisions.

This is an entertaining as well as academically sound volume. Cross-cultural religious workers and aid agencies will gain much from the scenarios Laudicina develops in this book. Likewise, international aid and medical workers can gain helpful insights.

As has been said, nothing is certain but change. And with increased transportation and communications the business world is changing faster than it ever has before. With changes of this magnitude and frequency, it is likely that the traditional slow moving companies of the past are indeed a thing of the past.

Two Examples:

We've all watched the AT&T breakup as then president Bob Allen traded the breakup of the corporation for permission to enter the computer business. The AT&T companies failed to understand how to make the move to an open competitive environment and this has been reflected in their stock prices.

There was a time when the computer industry was characterized by the term "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" -- IBM and Univac, Burroughs, NCR, DEC, CDC, GE and RCA. Where are these companies now, the industry is Microsoft, Intel and the companies that implement their technologies.

Such changes will happen in the future. The internet, the collapse of the two superpower world, the emergence of the European Common market, the changing world of Islam, rising Government intervention and more.

Successful transition will require flexibility and foresight. Without making any guarantees, this book at least points out how to approach the problems.