Sunday Posts

There was a way of developing a business: A company captured its local market first and then went abroad. Indeed, we are excluding Trading Companies such as the East India Company, which was set up as an overseas trade monopoly, and restricting ourselves here to more everyday sort of business. While not comparable to the spectacular rise and ignominious fall of the East India Company, many other businesses trading globally were spectacularly successful. The pinnacle of the 20th Century corporation was the Multinational Corporation, which attained unparallelled power, prestige and profits.  But in the Twenty-first century, even this shining example of business success is considered dated. 'Global' took place of 'multinational'. The usual model of building advantages in the home market before venturing abroad fell out of favour and we had born-global start-ups instead. And, a decade into the new millennium, this idea has spread from the domains of purel on line serv...

In 2013, when we started U-Aspire, I developed a certification for Global Business Professional. This was endorsed by UK's Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) and subsequently, we got this recognised for Masters credit by the University of Greenwich. However, when we started marketing, we put more effort in selling longer programmes like an Higher National Diploma, offering a pathway to UK degrees. This is what everyone apparently wanted to talk about, and we somehow accepted that as a small company with little capital, we did not have the wherewithal to change the conversation. And, yet, when I look back at the U-Aspire experience with the benefit of hindsight, I consider this to be one of our 'original sins', as we got to obsessed with degrees. With the talk of degrees, comes the question of ranking, legitimacy and the rest, a conversation a small and unknown company can hardly win. Alternative credentials, even if new and unknown, has its own attractions, and,...

In the world of Unicorn companies , privately held start-ups with valuations of $1 billion or more,  global strategy is no longer what it used to be. In fact, the old, dated idea that one goes global only after securing its home market, and having cash flows to sustain far-flung operations, is as good as dead. Getting global fast, rather, is the thing to do, as the copy-and-catchup innovation, as popular in many fast-growing emerging markets, can alter the dynamic for a start-up quite dramatically by capturing large market share in foreign markets and becoming a threat almost instantly. Whatever we may think of them, copycats, imitators, etc., the copy-and-catchup ecosystem in India, China, Middle East and Africa, are made of very smart entrepreneurs, savvy technologists, and investors who are ready to back them either looking to exit in a global M&A or going global through acquisitions themselves. With this, right now, start-ups are usually born-global rather than not, and d...

Having worked in International Setting most of career, and having lived in four different countries and engaging in business in at least half a dozen others, one of most attractive conversation topic for me is - what makes an organisation effective globally? In my work, I come across educational institutions which want to recruit students from all over the world, or businesses which want to trade, and indeed do, globally. I hear conference speeches and business presentations proclaiming global ambitions. I meet people dreaming of scale, globally. Yet, at the same time, I see the track record of global engagement to be one full of failures and disappointments, over-expectations and under-achievements.  I believe the essential problem of constructing a really global organisation comes from the essential tension between trust versus difference. Any organisation wants to impose an uniform culture - and indeed, doing so is essential. Only by promoting an uniform culture can an...

I am working towards a framework for developing global expertise. In my mind, it starts with a disjuncture, a disconnect, when things don't turn out the way it should. This should indeed be easy, it happens all too often when one travels to another country or starts working with someone from a different culture. Or, so we think. In reality, though, it does not happen that way at all. Even when we travel, or start working with someone from a different culture, we still remain within our own context: The disjuncture does not happen, we reject anything odd as an anomaly, an exception. So, my starting point is how one could establish the starting point - the disjuncture! Also, most of this may happen in a classroom or workplace setting, rather than travel (which I am now getting to think about - whether I start working on a travel learning model) and hence, I have to find a way to simulate 'disjuncture'. I don't think this is a particular challenge though, because dis...

The issue my work primarily concerns with is how to develop the 'global expertise' of the people that learns with us. Often, this is a bit too woolly, what is global expertise indeed, as expertise is seen as an ability to do something specific. And, in that is our first challenge - working out a definition and explaining why it is important. 'Global Expertise' grows out of the common sense dealings with globalisation around us. It is about being able to work together with people from all over the world, who come to work in and with our businesses. It is about taking opportunities that may be available to develop our expertise, and to derive best value for them. This is about adjusting with transient communities - communities that change all the time around us - rather than clinging to nostalgia and some fixed ideas about how life should be. And, yet, within this melee, global expertise is about developing a sense of self, a set of values, a professional identity a...

One of the programmes I have written recently is about preparing Global Professionals.  The rationale for writing such a programme was that with globalisation, all professions need global savvy. It is no longer the preserve of those working on International Trade and Development opportunities, but now it is required for most businesses. And, being global is no longer a preserve or a requirement solely in the Global 'North'. As South-to-South trade increases, and ambitious break-out firms appear in India, China, Mexico, Brazil, Turkey and everywhere else, global thinking becomes an imperative for a much wider spectrum of managers than before. The programme we wrote, titled Global Business Professional , is intended to be a preparation for professionals facing the hyper-global future. As with other things we do at U-Aspire, this programme is not a certification assessed by tests, but a practical, competency-based programme where demonstration of learned concepts are cri...

At the core of what we do at U-Aspire is about preparing Global Managers. 'Intensely Global' is what we want our graduates to be, so that their ambition, vision and practises are aligned to the possibilities and challenges of globalisation.  The term, globalisation, is indeed laden with value judgements. At one end, activists may see this an inexorable expansion of global capital, steamrolling the diversity and flattening the communities across the world. On the other end of the spectrum, there are flat world celebrators, people who see the undoing the curse of the Babel, the world unifying around the English language, and democracy with centrist parties who are hard to tell from each other. Either in its demonic conception or the dragon-slayer one, Globalisation evokes strong sentiments: It needs explanation if we are to put this down as the key graduate attribute of the U-Aspire education. The rise of 'Global' in our lexicon is somewhat curious, tied closely ...

I am writing a course on International Management and that allows me to research and reflect on who a global manager is (and, indeed, how to prepare one). I think many people embark on global assignments with little preparation, which happened to me in the past, and only learn as they go along. Reflecting on my own experience, I think companies can get a lot more out of their staff if they prepare them ahead for such assignments: The problem indeed remains that this is still a fuzzy field and it is hard to agree what one needs to prepare on. The most usual preparation is indeed to talk to someone who had a similar posting before. So, if you are being posted to China, you talk to an old China hand, soaking up as much as you can. This is useful, but if this is the only thing you do, which often is the case, such preparation can be counter-productive. Usually, this means that the presumptions of that mentor gets passed on to you, and unless you are lucky to have a mentor who learnt a...