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Latest read: Corporate Agility

How do organizations compete today?  Corporate Agility: A Revolutionary New Model for Competing in a Flat World provides a good reference on how major US companies have adopted a new business model for competing in a flat world.

corporate agilityAfter reading Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century book series on globalization and the breakthrough work by Jerry Wind and Victor & William Fung in Competing in a Flat World: Building Enterprises for a Borderless World.

I found chapters in Corporate Agility a fit perfectly to the above works.  Corporate Agility supports business case studies throughout the book that span a wide range of industries with lessons for all who are seeking new models for business in the 21st globalized century.

The strongest chapter is early in the book surrounding the shift in company buildings and the move to a mobile workforce that permits companies to break expensive building leases and create smaller ‘offices’ with limited administrative staff and resources.

I have experienced these efforts directly in working with clients who have been forced to trim staff and yet end up in an dry office complex with over 50% of their office cubes empty.

Actually I’m reminded of a PR company who hired temporary workers to “work” in all their empty cubes while a potential client made an office visit.  Needless to say they did not understand the basics of a company’s need for agility as described in the book.

I feel the early chapters of Corporate Agility is an expansion of The World Is Flat while the book’s case studies just touch the surface that is presented in detail by Competing in a Flat World.

Corporate Agility’s book website

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Latest read: Competing in a Flat World

Searching for the next emerging career in business?  Its Network Orchestrator and this does not refer to computer networks or chamber music.  If you understand fluid, globalized supply chains your on the right track.  Competing in a Flat World: Building Enterprises for a Borderless World proves success is less about what a company can do itself and more about what it can connect to in the global world in order to succeed.

Enter Globalization 3.0 and now business must be in a position to take advantage of a Network Orchestrator.

This book follows Li & Fung, a garment company which produces annual sales over $8 billion for some of the most respected brands in the world.

What may surprise you is that Li & Fung do not own any factories.

This book may be crafted for business schools but its larger impact is for educators.

More importantly parents should read this to see how the world has already changed and learn how their children (regardless of profession) will enter a vastly different marketplace.  The changes from their generation are drastically different.  Li & Fung’s message is quite simple: evolve or die.

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Latest read: The Elephant and the Dragon

Tectonic Economics?  Robyn Meredith has written a must read book, The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us. Take a look at Wall Street lately? Then think about oil, the environment and the post cold war shift in the global economy.  Its time for business and education to take note…and fast.
Tectonic Economics is about the impact of the two fastest growing economies who have embraced capitalism AND globalization at the same time.

And by the way America and Europe have been left out of this economic growth spurt since 9/11.

Actually at the rate China and India are rising you just need to look at both countries since 9/11 to see their immediate impact.

Meredith has done a great job of helping understand these two transformations.  There is no more waiting for a new generation they have arrived and instituted global change in less than a decade.  For most Americans they still do not see changes occurring at this speed affecting the global economy.

Meredith makes the hard salary figures easy to understand why companies around the globe have jumped to China and India.  But this will not be easy for IT professionals in America.  India’s InfoSys hires computer science graduates (some also have an MBA) to be a VoIP specialist in Bangalore with an annual salary of $5,000.  Yes, five grand a year for a VoIP specialist.  This similar type job in California via InfoSys pays $120,000.

This should be really easy to understand why hundreds of tech companies including Cisco, Apple, IBM and HP have moved operations (some larger than others) to Bangalore.  Remember you have to please your stockholders.  The changes already underway (and under the radar) will continue to add stress to America’s middle class.