Summary:
Excerpt from "The Quest for Global Dominance," by Anil Gupta, Vijay Govindarajan and Haiyan Wang. Not sure what the global dominance is about, but discusses some interesting concepts. Cultivating a global mindset (vs. parochial and diffuse mindsets). Update: global dominance refers to companies wanting to become global market leaders (02/04/2008)
Facts and figures:
- Mobile subscribers in China (2007): ~500m
- Internet users in China (2007): >200m
Notes:
- Global mindset: "combines an openness to and awareness of diversity across cultures and markets with a propensity and ability to synthesize across this diversity.
- Global manager: open-minded; respect how different countries do thing and understand why they do them that way; however, don't passively accept it, push the limits of culture; finding opportunities to innovate through "the debris of cultural excuses"
- Diffuse mindset: some people in firm may have global mindset, but is not philosophy of the whole firm; behaves parochial.
- Microsoft in Chinese market: example of global mindset
- China promises huge market but is accompanied by perils (e.g. software piracy, unpredictable public policy, local enterprises favoured)
- Sophistication level Chinese market in many respects lagging behind, but leading in some (e.g. 2007: mobile subscribers, 500m, and internet users, 200m)
- Global mindset enables company to outpace rivals in assessing market opportunities, establishing market presence necessary to pursue worthwhile opportunities, converting presence across multiple markets into global competitive advantage
- central value of global mindset: enabling the company to combine speed with accurate response; having an insight into the needs of the local market + being able to build cognitive bridges across these needs and between these needs and the company's own global experience and capabilities
- prisoner of diversity: intimidated by enormous differences across markets and staying back
- companies that stay local (eg. nursing homes, hospitals, radio stations, cleaning services, ...) may benefit from global mindset, too: 1) benchmarking and learning from product and process innovations outside domestic borders; 2) alertness to entry of foreign competitors in local market (eg. a global consolidator acquiring a local competitor and changing the rules of the game)
