The World’s Not Flat After All!

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If you’ve read a business magazine in the past year, you won’t have missed the impact Thomas Friedman’s Book has had on the way we view globalization. It’s interesting then to see the Harvard Business Review giving some airtime to a contrarian point of view articulated by HBS professor Pankaj Ghemawat in a book called Redefining Global Strategy: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter.

I wouldn’t go so far as to dispel the value of Friedman’s work, but what I like about Ghemawat’s book is that it diffuses the notion we’re all racing towards a homogenized global society where one-size fits all. If you’re a Japanese PR manager trying to make a communications strategy forged in San Francisco work in Tokyo…then you’ll understand what I’m getting at. The truth is that cultural, political and even economic factors still have a massive impact on how companies communicate around the world.

What I really like about Ghemawat’s book is his assertion that smart global strategies comprise three elements: Adaptation (adjusting to local markets), Aggregation (finding efficiencies and commonalities that overcome distance), and Arbitrage (exploiting specialist skills or lower costs wherever they happen to be).

In that three-piece-suite, Ghemawat nicely sums up our philosophy to globalization too. Text 100 has taken 26 years to build 31 local businesses market-by-market. We continue to invest in technology to ease collaboration and in sharing local knowledge globally (10 percent of our workforce has spent time in another market in the past five years). Last but not least, we’ve set up our GRO group (yes, we have to get a new name for it!) to take advantage of both specialist skills and cost advantages in Asia.

We’ll find out whether the PRWeek judges think all of that adds up to a great Mid-Sized Company strategy in a few months!

David McCulloch