Asia

In fast-growing markets, women are getting ahead faster, too.

In many countries, diversified business groups substitute for the institutions that support effective markets in capital, labor, and goods and services. Their capacity for doing this must be strengthened through restructuring, not destroyed through dismantling.

Someone in India recently asked me what I thought about an innovation strategy featuring a heavy dose of “imitation.” My response was, “Innovation isn’t Olympic diving.” What did I mean? An individual diver’s scores for an event are a factor of two things: how well they execute their dive, and the “degree of difficulty” of […]

Normally, the Olympic Games are a positive force in marketing. Worldwide marketing expenditures increase as official sponsors and unofficial free-riders attach themselves to the Olympic logo, to particular sports, national teams or individual athletes. Global brands, in particular, see the Olympics and World Cup soccer as the two most important international sporting events; brand linkage […]

Tapping its rich mine of educated female talent has been an important factor in allowing India to become one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. But recently this particular dynamo has been showing signs of strain. According to “Women of Tomorrow,” a recent Nielsen survey of 6,500 women across 21 different nations, Indian women are the […]

New research shows how to attract and retain the best employees in developing economies.

Four ways leaders from the global South have an edge in today's economy.

Close on the unveiling of the Nano, the cheapest car in the world, another Indian Company, HCL Infosystems, has announced a $350 laptop. With the lowest-priced laptop currently retailing for over $700 (excluding the “One Laptop Per Child” laptop effort), let’s examine how HCL arrived at this price for India and how other companies might […]

A king had a trusted monkey that was trained to wield a sword. As the king’s bodyguard, the monkey would go to any length to protect him. One day, while the king was sleeping, a fly started pestering him. The monkey tried to shoo the fly away but it always came back. Frustrated, the monkey […]

Back in the late 1970s, as a consultant to several Japanese computer giants, I read everything I could about Japanese business. It was all very interesting—interesting, but not particularly useful. When I became a line manager in 1981, I realized how little of what I’d read had any practical value. I couldn’t control interest rates, […]

I just attended the Wal-Mart Sustainability Summit in Beijing. There are times you know you're watching something special. The point of the meeting was...

The U.S. may be the world’s leading innovator, but it won’t be for long if investors, regulators, and the legal establishment continue to penalize companies for risk taking, says Deborah Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness. Recently, the council’s National Innovation Initiative, a leadership network of CEOs and university presidents, released a report in […]

They empowered employees to experiment with bold new ideas.

Just how big (or small) a market would Google leave behind were it to pull out of China today? Last month, China Internet Network Information Center, the country’s official domain registry and research organization, reported that by the end of 2009, the number of internet users in China had touched 384 million — more than […]

Changes in demand, market power, and business models are starting to produce surprising winners in big emerging markets.

They're ahead of many global counterparts, but dissatisfaction with career progression drives almost as many women out of the workforce as childcare.

I’m just back from London, where I participated in an idea summit organized by WPP, one of the world’s leading marketing-communications groups. The highlight of the day for me was a talk by Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP’s founder and CEO, and a true game changer in the realms of marketing, media, and strategy. Back in […]

The typical large business 20 years hence will have fewer than half the levels of management of its counterpart today, and no more than a third the managers. In its structure, and in its management problems and concerns, it will bear little resemblance to the typical manufacturing company, circa 1950, which our textbooks still consider […]

Last week, I visited India. It’s such a big, diverse place that I can’t help but leave each trip with some new observations. This time, I observed how the country’s infrastructure affects everything, at a hospital that had many of the trappings of a modern hospital that you would see in the West — until […]

Managers of business ventures that work with the world’s poor need more than financials and feel-good stories to measure success. They need to know exactly who’s benefiting and how.