All right, so globalization is not, strictly speaking, a management idea. It’s a worldwide phenomenon. But such a phenomenon, and so worldwide, that it has forced managers to rethink their markets, their production strategies[link to ‘outsourcing’], their supply chains[link to ‘supply chain management’] and their sources of competitive advantage[link to ‘the five forces of competition’]. And if some of them believe that globalization is a one-way street, perhaps they should rethink that too.
Like many of the ideas that management has to wrestle with, globalization is not a new one. International trade was in full swing along the Silk Road by the second century BC, and the years leading up The Great War were the high-point of ‘internationalism’, a frenzy of cross-border trade and investment. It’s only the fact that national economies turned in on themselves between the two world wars that makes the current phase of internationalism feel like a novelty at all. So managers have had to deal with it before, though not, it’s true, on quite this scale, at this speed and with this intensity. One new ingredient, the one that has amplified all the above, is technology - a coming together of telecommunications, the computer and the net which has made the world a smaller, smarter, speedier place. That would have counted for less without the second ingredient, the deregulation, privatization and opening up of markets by governments everywhere.
