Level playing field
GLOBALITY — Competing with Everyone from Everywhere for Everything: Harold L. Sirkin, James W. Hemerling & Arindam K. Bhattacharya; Hachette India, 612/614 (6th Floor), Time Tower, M. G. Road, Sector 28, Gurgaon-122001. Rs. 595.
T. R. Rajan
“Globality is not a new and different term for globalisation, it’s the name for a new and different global reality in which we’ll be competing with everyone, from everywhere, for everything.” So begins this book authored by three management consultants, all of them partners in the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). However, most of the submissions in the Globality Studies Journal (GSJ), an open access journal, relate to “theoretical, empirical, historical, and comparative studies on globalization.” Perhaps, etymologically “globality” is the state of being an interconnected world and globalisation the process.
Struggles
The existing major industry players are called “the incumbents” and the emerging ones “the challengers.” The book addresses the incumbents, all of them in the First World; it warns them that unless they act “now”, they risk being swamped by the “tsunami” generated by “the challengers”, a bunch of fitter, nimble-footed and aggressive enterprises from the rapidly developing economies such as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), Mexico, Turkey, and countries of Eastern Europe. What would consultants do without their power-points! True to their vocation, the authors make liberal use of bullets, the text between bullet-lists reading like the oral narrative during a presentation. Some readers may feel that this style enhances clarity; but readability is an unintended casualty. The book is the elaboration of the authors’ thesis that “to survive, compete, and succeed in the age of globality, every company will have to face and work its way through a set of challenges and difficulties that they call the seven “struggles of globality.” Many a management guru might have preferred the word “challenges” instead to give matters a positive spin. This reviewer feels that struggles indeed 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.
Survival strategies
Supported by the vast information bank of BCG’s international consultancy experiences and interviews with a distinguished array of industry leaders, the authors make telling points about the competitive forces rocking enterprises across the globe and offer specific-generic-strategic guidelines which could help navigate the choppy seas of global industry and trade, and survive.
The four mantras they recommend for the low (or rather appropriate) cost strategy are: optimising the labour, clustering, super-scaling and simplifying. It will come as a pleasant surprise to many that the authors decry the mindless labour-force de-mobbing in the name of cost reduction. Chennaites will be delighted to read that their own ‘Singara’ Chennai’s automotive industry is cited as an illustration of clustering. Emphasising the importance of nurturing talent globally and building local leadership, they extol the virtues of practices developed by “challengers” such as Wipro in India and Embraer in Brazil of recruiting nascent talent wherever they find it as well as developing leaders sans borders.
Out-of-the-box thinking
On reaching deep into markets, the authors strongly recommend out-of-the-box thinking by incumbents and challengers alike breaking off from the shackles of mind-set shaped by developed markets. Companies should not expect to get market data of the depth and detail they are accustomed to from the economies from which challengers are sprouting. “The only way for companies to find out what the next billion are doing,” they say, “is to immerse themselves in the lives of their target customers.” If a company does not realise that the entire world is its playing field and somebody thousands of miles away does what you do more effectively and reinvents its business deal, it would be left wondering “who moved my cheese?”
Delineating the idea “thinking big, acting fast, going outside”, the book cites the example of Tatas “making haste slowly” in their merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, never a hostile take-over, and following an adaptive model rather than a prescriptive one for post-acquisition integration making the process smoother and painless for all concerned. The authors are not certain that incumbent companies have it in them to innovate with ingenuity in rapidly developing countries. So they suggest that they proceed with caution.
Being consultants, the authors have taken to the catchword “globality” like a duck to water and produced a reasonably readable book. Although it addresses essentially a western audience this book will, I suppose, have far more admiring readers in India since it panders to our nationalistic belief that India indeed is the international flavour of the 21st century!
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