World annual FDI inflows rose from an average of $50 billion per year in the period 1981-85 to $1.1 trillion in 2009. A 21 fold increase!
Women in Rwanda have since 2005 been able to display and sell their hand-woven basket creations in Macy’s, at the other end of the world. These baskets sell like hot cake and disappear from the shelves as fast as they appear.
The consultants have a field day on these facts. They announce a new world order. Managers get swayed by the rhetoric. The world is flat; The world is my oyster, it is also my market, as well as my supply chain. Globalization is the predominant force and I better get my strategy’s sails aligned with its strong winds.
The consultants have a field day on these facts. They announce a new world order. Managers get swayed by the rhetoric. The world is flat; The world is my oyster, it is also my market, as well as my supply chain. Globalization is the predominant force and I better get my strategy’s sails aligned with its strong winds.
Every weekday beginning at 6 a.m., sellers and buyers from around the world converge on the Aalsmeer auction complex near Amsterdam to trade more than 20 million flowers and plants, one-third of which are roses. More than 1,500 foreign growers from countries as far away as Kenya and Israel now send their products to Holland to be auctioned.
G20 governments have introduced more trade barriers, including export restrictions, in the past six months than in previous periods since the financial crisis began, according to the monitoring report by the World Trade Organization on 24 May 2011.
People get 95% of their news from domestic sources.
90% of the world’s people will never leave the country where they are born.
Trade barriers rose thick and fast as soon as the economic going got tough during the recession. Summits designed to curb such practices, with exotic names such as ‘The Doha Rounds’, miserably failed to reach consensus or conclusions.
The currently ongoing G8 summit is like a kitty party; a lot gets discussed, pleasantries get exchanged between expensive suits, biscuits get consumed with disdain, nothing gets achieved.
The consultants announce a new paradigm; The world is as round as round can get. Local is the new global. Better to be a monopoly at home than a grain of sand on the world beach. I better anchor in my domestic market, in my protected comfort zone. The managers hunker down.
These dynamic paradoxes of our business environment are like Natrajan’s cosmic dance. In perpetual motion, a constant struggle between crests and troughs, in a state of continuous flux, like the bubbly waters of the Ganges.
Globalization versus protectionism, local versus global, an independent set of nation states versus an integrated global society.
Strategic responses soar to similar paradoxical heights.
Enterprises first vertically integrate to own and control the entire value chain or achieve the zenith of scale and size. They acquire, they merge, they partner. They become behemoths worthy of respect and fear.
Then soon after they shed off SBU’s in a hurry to focus on the core. They de-merge, sell off and divorce away their partners. It was only recently that I read how brilliantly Cisco had acquired Linksys and kept it at arm’s length using the ‘adapt’ rather than ‘aggregate’ strategy for M&A integration. However the tweet world is now alive with the fact that Cisco might sell off Webex and Linksys to focus on its core!
So what does one do in this era of paradoxes? Which strategies to deploy? Which jargon will remain so and which ones will evolve into the next big thing?
I am personally fascinated with the Honeycomb archetype to give organizations a stab at managing life’s increasing paradoxes. To architect the enterprise as a collection of small autonomous cells held together both by a common language and a crystal clear purpose. To power the strategic intent to ‘dream big, deliver small, move fast’.
Maybe it’s time to shed the legacy of legacy organization structures, cut through their fabric and carve out nimble, organizational cells instead. To breakdown big business processes into smaller services, big teams into micro-teams of sizes 3-5.
Maybe it is time to re-invent the way we see an enterprise - from a collection of big departments (HR, Finance, blah blah) to smaller cells each performing a distinctive service, in service of the customer. Self performing, self-motivated high performing cells requiring little supervision or management. As a whole these cells forming an organizational Honeycomb. A structure designed from ground up to be able to sense and respond to the world’s curve balls. Agile and nimble by birth.
Inspired by nature.
An organic organization.
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