Global Business Forum, BA 545

Globalization

•    Economist Globalization Special Report – download from Blackboard.
This is an excellent overview – current (published September 2008), thought-provoking, and full of great information.

•    Globality: Competing with Everyone from Everywhere for Everything, by Hal Sirkin, Jim Hemerling, and Arindam  Bhattacharya (New York: Business Plus, 2008).

Three authors from the Boston Consulting Group draw upon extensive experience to demonstrate a shift in how businesses are globalizing

•    Redefining Global Strategy: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter, by Pankaj Ghemawat (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007) – download Chapter 2 from Blackboard.
Provides a good framework for comparing diverse countries and markets.

BRICS

•    Goldman Sachs BRICs report – download from Blackboard.

Why Brazil, Russia, India and China are the world’s next big economic powers and how this will play out.   (Mexico and South Korea are also increasingly being included as BRIC-level economies by Goldman Sachs and others)

China

•    Mckinsey Report  – Competition from China – download from Blackboard

•    Global Diversity: Winning Customers and Engaging Employee within World Market, by Ernest Gundling and Anita Zanchettin (Boston: Nicolas Brealey, 2006) – download chapter on China from Blackboard

Great detailed insight into the market and workforce differences within regions of China – and also within other countries.

•    River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler (New York: Harper Perenniel, 2006)

Hessler writes with great insight on China – of all the U.S. business/travel journalists, he is the one recommended most.  This memoir reads like a novel.  His subsequent book, Oracle Bones, is equally good, but slightly less accessible.

Culture

•    The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently – and Why, by Richard Nisbett. (New York: Free Press, 2004)

The title says it all.  The author is a psychologist who validates his points with interesting research.  He also includes an excellent comparison between the Confucian East and Aristotelian West – insight into the underpinnings of why we think the way we do and what we can learn from those who come from a different tradition.