Globalization In Its Own Spirit

I was going through my International Business Strategy book by my IBS Prof Charles Schell – who is a Canadian, is teaching at a British business school, Manchester Business School, comes down to the MBS Dubai campus to teach about businesses that are being carried out all over the world to a class of students that are from 14 different nations, and that are mostly managers managing companies from different parts of the world – and I hit an anecdote that is worth sharing in order to explain globalization in its own spirit.

“In this interdependent global economy, an American might drive to work in a car designed in Germany that was assembled in Mexico by DaimlerChrysler from components made in the US and Japan that were fabricated from Korean steel and Malaysian rubber. She may have filled the car with gasoline at a British Petroleum (BP) service station owned by a British multinational company. The gasoline could have been made from oil pumped out of a well off the coast of Africa by a French oil company that transported it to the US in a ship owned by a Greek shipping line. While driving to work, the American might talk to her stockbroker on a Nokia cell phone that was designed in Finland and assembled in Texas using chip sets produced in Taiwan that were designed by Indian engineers working for Texas Instruments, a US chip giant, at its Bangalore office. She could tell the stockbroker to purchase shares in Deutsche Telekom, a German telecommunications firm that was transformed from a former state-owned monopoly into a global company by an energetic Israeli CEO. She may turn on the car radio, which was made in Malaysia by a Japanese firm, to hear a popular hip-hop song composed by a Swede and sung by a group of Danes in English who signed a record contract with a French music company to promote their record in America. The driver might pull into a drive-through coffee stall run by a Korean immigrant and order a “single-tall-non-fat” latte” and chocolate-covered biscotti. The coffee beans come from Brazil and the chocolate from Peru, while the biscotti was made locally using an old-Italian recipe. After the song ends, a news announcer might inform the American listener that anti-globalization protests at a meeting of heads of state in Davos, Switzerland, have turned violent. One protester has been killed. The announcer then returns to the next item, a story about how fear of interest rate hikes in the US has sent Japan’s Nikkei stock market index down to new lows for the year.”

This is the world we live in. Does this make you uncomfortable? Get used to it – the more, the better!