Asia

Normally, the Olympic Games are a positive force in marketing. Worldwide marketing expenditures increase as official sponsors and unofficial free-riders attach themselves to the Olympic logo, to particular sports, national teams or individual athletes. Global brands, in particular, see the Olympics and World Cup soccer as the two most important international sporting events; brand linkage […]

Indian inflation has just hit a 3-year high of 7.41%. We can take comfort from the fact that many of our neighbors are faced with 20%; even China has reported an 11-year high of 8.7%. Global trends are cited as the primary reason for the present situation. The IMF has reported that food prices in […]

Just how big (or small) a market would Google leave behind were it to pull out of China today? Last month, China Internet Network Information Center, the country’s official domain registry and research organization, reported that by the end of 2009, the number of internet users in China had touched 384 million — more than […]

Back in the late 1970s, as a consultant to several Japanese computer giants, I read everything I could about Japanese business. It was all very interesting—interesting, but not particularly useful. When I became a line manager in 1981, I realized how little of what I’d read had any practical value. I couldn’t control interest rates, […]

The visibility of female leaders makes a difference.

The U.S. may be the world’s leading innovator, but it won’t be for long if investors, regulators, and the legal establishment continue to penalize companies for risk taking, says Deborah Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness. Recently, the council’s National Innovation Initiative, a leadership network of CEOs and university presidents, released a report in […]

President Obama’s upcoming trip to India is probably the most highly mediatized presidential visit ever. The fact that the trip comes so soon after a “shellacking” in the mid-term elections makes it even more important. Expectations are running high in both the US and India with geopolitical experts and media pundits comparing the visit to […]

Local manufacturing and online sales channels.

After all the investigations into the Satyam scandal are over, one question will remain: why did its founder, B Ramalinga Raju, plunge into fraud? Four...

The typical large business 20 years hence will have fewer than half the levels of management of its counterpart today, and no more than a third the managers. In its structure, and in its management problems and concerns, it will bear little resemblance to the typical manufacturing company, circa 1950, which our textbooks still consider […]

Getting tough on China is becoming a popular idea. President Obama has established an Interagency Trade Enforcement Committee with a $27 million budget to hit back at unfair trade. Not to be outdone, Mitt Romney has said that if elected, he’ll declare China a currency manipulator on his first day in office. It’s easy to […]

I am currently in New Delhi attending the India Economic Summit organized by the World Economic Forum (WEF). This Summit, which marks the 25th year of WEF’s engagement in India, is themed “India’s Next Generation of Growth.” Last Saturday, I participated in a brainstorming session on how India can increase its workforce quality and employability […]

Years ago, while visiting friends in the United States, I happened to see the classic children’s film The Wizard of Oz. Near the end, Dorothy at last appears before the all-powerful wizard—a terrifying image of smoke and light. Only when her dog, Toto, tugs at a curtain over to one side does she see a […]

It’s time India’s IT companies read the writing on the wall, and reinvented themselves.

In a foreign market, do you need to tweak your efforts — or entirely reframe them?

The Idea: As the head of GE Capital in India, Bhasin found its growth hamstrung by government bureaucracy. Then he had a vision—he could offer back-office services across GE Capital. It was the beginning of Genpact—and of an entire industry. For several months in the late 1990s, I was inundated with phone calls from competitors […]

On February 16, 2012, Barclays of U.K. launched Pingit, a service that lets people send and receive money using a smartphone. But this isn’t the first big innovation in mobile banking. These innovations are already happening in developing countries. Poor countries are jumping ahead of rich ones by building a 21st century infrastructure (because they […]

Today, most multinationals have a conspicuous social conscience. They publicize their internal codes of conduct, monitor labor conditions in their global supply chains, and require suppliers to meet basic labor practice standards. But despite efforts to be better global citizens, companies by themselves are unable to eliminate abuses in their supply chains. In fact, so […]

The Idea: Fadi Ghandour has built one of the most successful entrepreneurial enterprises to emerge from the Arab world, Aramex International , overcoming rejections, cash-flow crises, and naysayers in every country where he tried to do business.

As Kodak has discovered, it’s now possible to establish Western-style corporations in China.