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Race for the World: Strategies to Build a Great Global Firm
Jane Fraser , Lowell L. Bryan , and Wilhelm Rall Manufacturer: Harvard Business School Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 087584846X |
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In Race for the World, consultants with McKinsey & Co. look at the vast changes in the world's economy that are altering the way almost everyone does business. The authors believe that geographic barriers to business will virtually disappear over the next 30 years and that the implications for companies could be devastating--or incredibly rewarding. "Over time, the only class that matters will be world class," write Lowell Bryan, Jane Fraser, Jeremy Oppenheim, and Wilhelm Rall. "All others will be forced to restructure or go out of business."The authors see world economic integration spurred on by new access to capital markets, advances in computing and communication technologies, and a rapid decline in government influence. While some companies, such as Cisco, Yahoo!, General Electric, and Enron, should reap tremendous benefits, most are moving too slowly, according to the consultants. The book provides many strategies for success in the next millennium and includes chapters on the importance of market capitalizations, for example, and building "superior intangibles--intellectual property, talent, brands and networks." Race for the World is a stimulating read for managers, investors, and others interested in the future of business. --Dan Ring
Book Description
Informed by the findings of McKinsey & Company's extensive investigation of the problems and practices at globalizing firms, Race for the World contends that the rewards of building a great global firm at this moment in time are extraordinary. Examples of early winners in the global game, including powerhouses such as Coca-Cola, Citibank, and Nestle, reveal how the truly distinctive players utilize their intangible assets to think and act differently from the multinational models of old. The authors explain how firms can drive their transition from national to global markets by pursuing and capturing entire portfolios of global opportunities while there's still time. Race for the World provides managers and strategists with a coherent set of prescriptions and recommendations for linking the new roles of capital, brands, talent, and knowledge into an actionable game plan for leading the charge in the new global economic arena.Customer Reviews:
Business strategy for inexorable globalization.......2003-09-14
The basic framework within which this book views the future is shared by similar analyses done by other organizations. Because world trade has tended to grow faster than world economic output, the share of world output produced and consumed in global markets will inevitably grow rapidly - accordingly to this book, from about one-fifth of global output in the late 1990s to four-fifths by 2030. Within this time frame, total global ouptut will also grow, from $28 trillion in 1997 to $91 trillion in 2027. Whence the opportunities for a susbtantial reshaping of the competitive space for global corporations.
What matters is that the fundamental message of this book (which is not by itself novel) is unchanged by the contemporary drivers of competitiveness for national economies and corporations: a dramatic lowering of so-called interaction costs and of barriers in product and factor markets continues to erode the advanatges of geographic incumbents in the business world, fostering the creation of cross-geographic specialists and consolidation of traditional integrators.
Drawing substantially from Mckinsey's own research and data gathered from its Fortune 500 clientele, as well as insights from unconventional non-business sources such as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, And Steel, the book advises global corporate leaders on how to reshape their firms and create global talent teams. The book is, not surprisingly - given the audience of the book - silent on what policy implications there are for countries which are also trying to adapt to these realities, other than the obvious imperative to open their national economies to world-class suppliers of tangible and intangible capital. There remains an important policy agenda to explore if one takes the fundamental propositions of this book seriously.
Very clear vision.......2001-09-06
yet another mediocre business book on globalism.......2001-04-19
"Race for the World," another in the series of books by McKinsey & Co. consultants on how to operate in the global economy, straddles the great grey area in between these two poles. The book starts off with a strong analysis of the "transition" economy, in which geographic barriers are rapidly falling before the globalist wave: world's financial markets converging and digital technologies are lowering communication costs; national governments are "under market pressure" to remove the old legal and regulatory barriers to global competition; consumers are gaining unprecedented power, both to find the best prices through some convenient dot.com company and to vote via their investment dollars. This ongoing race (or "midgame") will determine which corporations can position themselves to become the "shapers" of the next century.
The midgame, the authors assert, offers extraordinary, though rapidly vanishing, opportunities around which to build new corporate strategies. With their new-found access to foreign markets, corporations can create "virtuous cycles of geographic expansion," simultaneously increasing their scale of operation, lowering their costs, and using new incoming profits to continue to invest elsewhere. Finally, by setting up their own networks of information, corporations can take advantage of cross-arbitrage opportunities, that is, buy goods and services from whatever country offers them cheapest.
So far so good. While none of this is particularly new or original, it is in the formulation of strategies that the book will stand or fall. According to the authors, global firms must invest in a variety of intangible capital, including intellectual property, talented managers, networks of able partners, and brand image. If a corporation can integrate these intangible assets into a system that operates as of a piece, the authors maintain, then it will have established "a compelling global value proposition": while single elements in the system may be replicable, imitating it as a whole is far more difficult for competitors. Furthermore, the authors argue, global firms should "control, [though] not own" the value chain, which represents a reversal from the practices once praised in large, vertically integrated firms. Sensible advice.
Unfortunately, at this point the authors cross the line that separates lack of originality from banality. Firms must, the authors solemnly inform us, approach potential deals with the appropriate risk assessment techniques, many of which were developed for investment bankers. These techniques include: 1) "disaggregating" the many risks involved in large business decisions, that is, breaking them down to examine who bears what risks and for what, etc.; 2) focusing on those risks for which the firm enjoys "familiarity advantages"; 3) portfolio theory, i.e. diversification spreads risks; 4) options theory, or the ability to acquire a firm at a specified date in the future for a known price. These techniques, the authors conclude, will allow firms to "overcom[e] confusion (lack of necessary knowledge), complexity (unknown interdependencies), and uncertainty (unknowable future events)." While top executives are perhaps too busy to reflect on these strategies systematically, it is difficult to imagine that they haven't thought about these things already.
However, there are deeper flaws at the core of the book. For starters, the seductive rhetoric of globalism is accepted as a given and fails to realistically anticipate any other contingencies, which is a disservice to business readers. The authors' insistence on proper risk analysis techniques cannot capture these complexities. Instead, the authors treat us to a simple extrapolation of current economic conditions. It remains unclear whether the current boom represents a structural trend (a "new economy") or another speculative financial bubble. Confusing the two can lead to terrible mistakes. Unfortunately, though its purpose is to devise better strategies for managers overwhelmed by global change, "Race for the Future" offers no useful guidance in this regard.
Even worse, evidence that contradicts their vision is ignored. The authors naively assume that globalisation is an unalloyed good, that consumers will prefer cheaper, more uniform goods to traditional indigenous varieties.
Many of these shortcomings can be explained by the poorly hidden agenda of the book. How, one wonders, could four intelligent co-authors ever agree on a detailed analytic framework? The answer is simple: the book is part of the McKinsey & Co. publicity machine. It promotes a company methodology, the conclusions of which come straight from McKinsey "research," a kind of parallel universe of jargon, anecdotes, and fierce internal competition for attention between young "associates" fresh out of university. I suspect that, under the steady hand of good ghost writers, "Race for the World" was cobbled together from disparate articles from the McKinsey Quarterly with over-confidence and little critical regard. As a result, the book's "authors," imbued with the company's mystique, fail to recognise the mediocrity of their ideas and advice.
Nonetheless, "Race for the World" is no no-read. As long as the reader is aware of its limitations, it offers a solid introduction to gung-ho globalism. While the book contains more than could be written on a book flap, its ideas could have been resumed in, say, one article in the McKinsey Quarterly.
A sharp, narrow focus on a few elements of strategy.......2000-06-08
My overall impression is that this is another example of a very good extended article that has been expanded into a 300 page book. It also suffers from a lack of summarisation of the main points. The overall impression is of a sharp but rather narrow focus on a few key elements in a successful global strategy, representing itself as the whole.
Global Business Economics 101 for Freshmen.......2000-05-24
This book is essentially built around one concept: That cross-boundary competition for goods and services will go from 20 percent of world GDP now to 80 percent in 30 years. Naturally, this assumption is pretty critical. Chances are that not all industries will follow this model exactly. Some business areas will stay much more local than others, something this book doesn't talk much about. If globalization slows down or speeds up very much, business plans will quickly get out-of-kilter. Although the authors emphasize not under or overestimating globalization, they do not provide much insight into how one should think about how fast to go.
Of the other irresistible forces in the global economy (like increasingly rapid technology changes, currency fluctuations, changing customer needs, homogenized culture, shifts in government regulation) little more than passing references are made except to assume that the cost of capital for big firms will go down and stay there (based on the trend of the last few years).
I found that putting globalization at the center for your strategy is a doubtful thing to do. Other factors could easily be more important. How to decide how important globalization is for your company was not well addressed.
I also suspect that the authors are somewhat inexperienced in best practice research, which makes me nervous about their conclusions. For example, they were surprised to find that 25 successful global firms relied on different strategies to succeed. Anyone who has done best practice benchmarking knows that best practices are scattered around among firms, not cloned in total into each leading organization. It may also be the case that globalization was only one factor in the selection of these practices. Without normalizing for the influence of the other factors, how do we know what the globalization best practices really are? This book is so qualitative that I doubt if any serious quantitative analysis was done in this area. If it was, I didn't see much sign of it in the text.
I think that readers would have benefited from more detailed case histories. I happen to know a lot about how the companies (used as examples in the book) operate. If I had not had that knowledge, I think I could easily have drawn the wrong conclusions from the sketchy information that the authors provide. For example, the development of how Enron enters new business areas is worth a book all by itself. AES is another interesting example, around a somewhat different model, but was surprisingly left out by the authors.
If you are an undergraduate business student, you will probably find this book provocative and interesting. If nothing else, you will have a better sense for what kind of executives will be in short supply in the future. As I mentioned earlier, if you are a business executive, you may be fascinated in places, but probably won't find much actionable in it. My 3 star grade is an average of 5 stars for the business student and 1 star for usefulness to the executive.
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Race For The World Strategies to Build a Great Global Firm
Lowell, Jane Fraser, Jeremy Oppenheim, and Wilhelm Rall Bryan Manufacturer: Harvard Business School P. ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: B000W5H0B0 |
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Race for the World: Strategies to Build a Great Global Firm
Jane; Rall, Wilhelm; Oppenheim, Jeremy; Br Fraser Manufacturer: Harvard Business School Pr ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: B000NY2NV2 |
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The Race For The World: Strategies To Build A Great Global Firm.(Review) (book review): An article from: Government Finance Review
Brennan Schwarz Manufacturer: Government Finance Officers Association ProductGroup: Book Binding: Digital ASIN: B0008JFVS4 Release Date: 2005-07-28 |
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This digital document is an article from Government Finance Review, published by Government Finance Officers Association on August 1, 2000. The length of the article is 1000 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
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Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America's Death Row
David R. Dow Manufacturer: Beacon Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0807044199 |
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When David Dow took his first capital case, he supported the death penalty. He changed his position as the men on death row became real people to him, and as he came to witness the profound injustices they endured: from coerced confessions to disconcertingly incompetent lawyers; from racist juries and backward judges to a highly arbitrary death penalty system.Customer Reviews:
A Sad but Compelling Book.......2005-06-07
A Highly Readable, Compelling Work.......2005-05-27
A thoughtful, unsparing look at the death penalty in action.......2005-05-13
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Innocence isn't everything.(The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions by Sister Helen Prejean)(Executed on a Technicality: Lethal ... Review): An article from: The Progressive
Anne-Marie Cusac Manufacturer: Thomson Gale ProductGroup: Book Binding: Digital ASIN: B000CR8NJ6 Release Date: 2006-06-27 |
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This digital document is an article from The Progressive, published by Thomson Gale on October 1, 2005. The length of the article is 2675 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
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Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation: The Construction of Pacific Rim Regionalism
John Ravenhill Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0521667976 |
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Since its establishment in 1989, APEC has graduated from a ministerial-level gathering of nine countries to an institution that stages annual summits, has a permanent secretariat, and whose twenty-one members have committed themselves to establishing free trade in the region. A decade after its foundation, however, members have been increasingly frustrated with the grouping's progress. In this theoretically sophisticated book, John Ravenhill examines the reasons for APEC's establishment, its evolution, and the causes of its failures.
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Economic Development and Cooperation in the Pacific Basin: Trade, Investment, and Environmental Issues
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0521583667 |
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The Pacific Basin is the most dynamic economic region of the world, and has become a model for efficient international specialization, growth, and rising living standards. This book brings together leading economic experts from around the region to appraise and distill the most important issues facing its policy makers, including trade relations, foreign investment flows, and the environment. As we stand at the threshold of the Pacific Century, the lessons this region imparts to us hold the promise of rising living standards around the world.
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Approaches to Intelligent Agents: Second Pacific Rim International Workshop on Multi-Agents, PRIMA'99, Kyoto, Japan, December 2-3, 1999 Proceedings (Lecture ... / Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence)
Manufacturer: Springer ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 3540668233 |
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This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second Pacific Rim International Workshop on Multi-Agents, PRIMA'99, held in Kyoto, Japan in December 1999. The 17 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 43 submissions. The papers are organized in sections on agent cooperation, agent mobility, learning in multiagent systems, interface agents, and agent system design.
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Areas of cooperation in library development in Asian and Pacific regions: Papers presented at the 1983 joint annual Program of the Asian/Pacific American ... June 28-29, 1983, Los Angeles, California
Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Manufacturer: Distributed by the Ohio University Libraries ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 0930691008 |
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Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation: Challenges and tasks for the twenty-first century (Pacific Trade and Development Conference//(Papers))
Manufacturer: Routledge ProductGroup: Book Binding: Library Binding ASIN: 0415248051 |
Book Description
Featuring contributions from distinguished groups of international academic experts, this book is essential reading for all those interested in political and economic developments in the Asia Pacific. This book provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive account of the APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) organization and examines the challenges APEC now faces at the beginning of the new century.
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Asia-pacific Economic Cooperation Apec Handbook (World Strategic and Business Information Library)
USA International Business Publications Manufacturer: Intl Business Pubns USA ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 143300254X |
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Economic Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific Region
John P. Hardt Manufacturer: Westview Pr (Short Disc) ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 0813379415 |
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The Economic Development of the Pacific Basin: Growth Dynamics, Trade Relations and Emerging Cooperation
Willy Kraus , and Wilfried Lukenhorst Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0312004524 |
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Economic Dynamism in the Asia-Pacific (Pacific Studies (London, England).)
G. Thompson Manufacturer: Routledge ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 0415172748 |
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Economic Dynamism in the Asia Pacific examines the rise of the importance of the Pacific as an economic region, the sources of that rise, its future development and the consequences for the global economy. The chapters establish the extent to which the Asia-Pacific has developed as a regional system through an analysis of the patterns of integration of the principal economies. The volume reflects on the relationship between the key individual economies of Japan, Korea, China and the United States, and the rest of the regional economy. The book also discusses the consequences of this dynamic regional economy on the performance and governance of the international economic system.
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An understandable and accessible road to the Asia Pacific.......2002-12-08
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Economics Relations and Developments in Asia and the Pacific: Collected Papers of International Cooperation Studies
Manufacturer: Kobe University ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: B000HT9LHW |
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