Riding the globalisation wave

There has been a spate of new titles in the market on globalisation and winning in a globalised world. By and large, these books tend to deal with the same set of topics""strategy, focus, leadership, to name a few. So, when one picks up another title in the same genre, Designed to Win, one approaches it with some scepticism. On closer scrutiny, however, it turns out to be somewhat different, in that the emphasis is more on operations and implementation. This seems to be the flavour of the season (Gary Hamel too dealt with this very topic in a recent seminar in Mumbai.) With India Inc in an exuberant rush to invest in all parts of the world, this book should provide a useful aide-memoire to corporate leaders about the pitfalls and opportunities in a globalised operation.

The authors, Hiroaki Yoshihara and Mary Pat McCarthy, with over 25 years each in senior positions at multinational companies, and as senior partners at KPMG, have the credentials to write on this subject. In their consultancy practice, they had occasion to take a close look at the problems and opportunities of globalisation facing corporate leaders. They have thus a large number of case studies to illustrate their theories.

The authors' principal advice to global aspirants is to aim to be the employer of choice in every region they operate in. This requires not just high ethical standards with great emphasis on compliance, but also a very enlightened HRD policy covering areas like work-life balance for employees, developing a culture to unleash talent and active mentoring, to name a few. They quote the Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, "The 2020 company's values will be courage, compassion, competence and integrity." The authors also touch on the subject of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), but they prefer to look at it in a more constructive way, as corporate social opportunity. They borrow extensively from C K Prahalad's book, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

The authors then go on to deal with other aspects like operations, supply chain management and global marketing. Two interesting case studies relate to FedEx and Dell, which achieved market leadership by scrupulous attention to operational details and quality monitoring. Japanese industry has, of course, perfected supply chain management, and Yoshihara's familiarity with Japanese industry has enabled the authors to present several interesting case studies from such firms as Toyota, Sony and Matsushita.

Large parts of the book contain commonplace observations. The reader has to be discerning enough to get past the verbiage and pick up nuggets of wisdom. The chapter on "Governing Change" is particularly illuminating. One of the key ingredients in this is scenario planning, and there is a detailed account of Shell, with its legendary forecasting capability serving as a benchmark. It was the only oil major which foresaw (in the late 1960s) the probability of oil prices going up five-fold, and had already put in place suitable measures when the oil prices did shoot up in 1973.

The authors refer to a study of Fortune 500 companies that reveals that barely 30 per cent of the list had any kind of scenario planning. This probably accounts for the fact that only 70 companies that figured on the Fortune 500 list when it commenced fifty years ago remain on the list today.

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DESIGNED TO WIN STRATEGIES FOR BUILDING A THRIVING GLOBAL BUSINESS

Hiroaki Yoshihara and
Mary Pat McCarthy
Tata McGraw-Hill
Price: Rs 399; Pages: 274

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Other Books

Ever since Edward de Bono's masterpiece Lateral Thinking, people in management have accepted that creativity can actually be taught in quite the same way as any other subject. The result of this acceptance""hard-won, as it once was ""has been a flurry of books trying to spark off business creativity. This is why one often looks wearily at the next title that finds its way to shopshelves. Yet, it is a help when someone puts together a pithy little book that encapsulates all the modern creativity tools that have come about, and re-contextualises them with local market experience. This is what S Ramachander's book achieves. Who knows, under cliffhanging circumstances, a little bit of the advice could prove to be the proverbial lifeline.

CREATIVITY@ WORK
S Ramachander
Sage
Rs 320; 203 Pages