Magic On This Planet

Photo courtesy:  ©Laurel Delaney 2012, "Kayakers in Rogers Park"

"If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water." ~ Loren Eiseley 

Betting on a Bright Spot For Growth: The United States of America

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That's according to Clorox CEO Don Knauss.  In the WSJ article, "To Clorox CEO, U.S. Is Bright Spot for Growth," Knauss indicates he is staying out of China and developing markets in Latin America and the Middle East.  He's also betting on a bright spot for growth:  United States.

WSJ: Why is Clorox targeting growth in Latin America and the Middle East, instead of countries like China or Brazil?

Mr. Knauss: We think it is much less risky. The competitive intensity [in the BRIC countries] has ratcheted up many times what it was five to 10 years ago. When competitive intensity goes up, margins go down.We looked at our current countries in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru, where sales of bleach and other cleaners are growing 5% to 7% ...

Learn more here.

Globalization and Globaloney

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Pankaj Ghemawat is the author of Global 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It, and he takes the stage to ask an important question: Just how global are we really?

Watch and listen here.

Related posts, five (5) over six years.

Cultivating Global Leaders

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In our vastly interconnected world, we need to become effective global leaders to stay competitive.  Do you have what it takes to lead across cultures?  If not, McKinsey's got your back.  There's just one catch.  To read the full article, you must register:

Developing Global Leaders

If that's not enough, try these on for size:

Developing Global Leaders Is America's Competitive Advantage

What It Means to be a Global Leader in the 21st Century

Love E-Commerce

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How do I love e-commerce?  Let me count the ways but in this instance, here are six reasons for loving your e-commerce site after it’s set up.

Here's the first one:

1. Customers can buy anytime and anywhere. After you are fast asleep and thinking that no more business can be generated, guess again. At their convenience, consumers can browse your site, discover new things and buy them. You wake up the next day, go to work and learn that ten percent of your total revenues were generated over night via e-commerce!

Read the entire article:  6 Reasons to Love E-Commerce

The Wrap Dress Lady Is Global

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Diane von Furstenberg is selling the wrap dress to women worldwide.  Her approach to China's rising middle class is different - more personalized.

Read the entire article:

A Designer Brings 'Best Friends' to China

Bird Lifeguarding

©Laurel Delaney 2012, "Bird Lifeguarding"

"I realized that if I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes." ~ Charles Lindbergh

Redefining the Way Business Is Done: Global Mobile Commerce

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Power up people.  The best global sales opportunity is yet to come.  Are you prepared for global m-commerce?

The article below examines what’s driving the explosive growth of global mobile commerce, how it is going to redefine the way business is done all over the world and how to leverage it to sell more stuff.

Read:  How to Make the Most of Global Mobile Commerce

International Business Travel: Don't Overpack

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Before you head out for your first overseas business trip, here are some essentials for a one-week business trip, including wardrobe, accessories and documents.

Needed items will naturally vary according to the type of trip you are making and the activities to which you've committed yourself.

International Business Travel: Packing Smart For An International Business Trip

Why Export?

Top Ten Countries for The Global Small Business Blog Readership

Here's where majority of our readers come from - Top 10 Countries:

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. India
4. Canada
5. Germany
6. Australia
7. Indonesia
8. Malaysia
9. Spain
10. Brazil

Many thanks for your readership - to all!

Redefining Global

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Dean Edward A. Snyder is redefining what it means to be global at Yale.  In addition:

The school is also introducing a leadership development program—to be run by a retired West Point brigadier general—which Mr. Snyder says will focus on giving and receiving feedback and keeping a leader's ego in check.

Learn more here.

Lost in Sizing Translation

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European imports like Moschino, Zara, Mango and H&M are wildly popular. I know. I buy those brands quite often.

But try translating the sizes to American. For example, when I try on an H&M jacket in my regular size, it feels two sizes too small.

What's a person to do when they shop online?

Read: Shopping Locally, But Sizing Globally

Errors That Smart People Make

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From the Christian Science Monitor:

Blaming globalization

The world has had economic downturns before, but what makes this one different goes beyond mere numbers on a balance sheet. Its roots are found in the growing doubts that people are having about our increasingly globalized world ...

Good Reads: Globalization and the Glass Half Full

Can America Lead the Global Economy?

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 By Edward Conard (author of "Unintended Consequences"):

What I learned at Bain Capital working with Mitt Romney: outsourcing is good and America's future isn't manufacturing, it's ideas. 

Read the full article: How America Can Lead the Global Economy

What Does a Huge Leap in Translations to English Mean?

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Are we buying into a culture when we learn a language?  Interesting question.  Tim Parks has some thoughts about that plus more here:

Inevitably, as the number of people speaking English increases, so do the sales of novels in English. But not enormously. The surprise is that increased knowledge of English has also brought a much more marked increase in sales of literature written in English but read in translation in the local language. When you learn a language you don’t just pick up a means of communication, you buy into a culture, you get interested. 

Read the entire piece:  Most Favored Nations

Small Business Exports Have Increased Under Obama's Watch

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Small business exports have increased under the current U.S. administration's watch, but other areas for business owners, such as, obtaining loans, cutting red tape and lowering healthcare costs have shown no improvement.

Read Scott Shane's commentary for Businessweek here.

Are BRICs Slowing Down?

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Are BRICs – the world’s big, fast-growing developing economies — slowing down?

The article below states:

Growth in Brazil, Russia, India, and China is expected to slow considerably in 2012, dampening an already weak global economy.

Read the entire article: Is the Show Over for the BRIC Economies?

May This Purple Bear Keep You Humble

Photo courtesy:  ©2012 Laurel J. Delaney, "Purple Bear"

Bears keep me humble. They help me to keep the world in perspective and to understand where I fit on the spectrum of life. We need to preserve the wilderness and its monarchs for ourselves, and for the dreams of children. We should fight for these things as if our life depended on it, because it does. ~ Wayne Lynch – from "Bears: Monarchs of the Northern Wilderness," 1993

Are Global Businesses Anti-Social in a Social Media Age?

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I don't believe most of this ... what about you?

New worldwide research by Satmetrix, the Net Promoter software company, has found that the majority of organizations of all sizes across B2C and B2B are blind to the opportunities and threats of social media.

Study:  Global Businesses Are Anti-Social in a Social Media Age (CRM Magazine)

Post by:  The Global Small Business Blog

The Perils of Globalization

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Is the Swedish furniture giant Ikea selling sex? Oh please. Here's the headline:

IKEA red-faced over product that sounds like sex.

Ikea, the Swedish furniture giant hires translator to vet merchandise as product names run afoul of Thailand’s conservative mores. Their story is just the latest example of the perils of names in a globalized economy.

Read the entire article here.

One more tidbit:

The company, which launched its fifth-largest superstore in Bangkok last year, realized that terms like Jättebra, for a plant pot, can echo a crude Thai term for sex.

Is Tipping Obligatory in America?

Below is an article by Max Fisher for The Atlantic which covers in part, as he says, the surprising frankness in discussing the warts of American history and society.

The United States is the second greatest tourist draw in the world, with 60-million-plus visitors in 2010 alone (France, number one, attracted almost 80 million). Flipping through a few of the many English-language tourist guides provides a fascinating, if non-scientific and narrow, window into how people from the outside world perceive America, Americans, and the surprises and pitfalls of spending time here. 

The comments are telling and really crack me up.

Read the entire article:  Welcome America, Please Be On Time:  What Guide Books Tell Foreign Visitors to the U.S.

Got a New Tech Idea?

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No matter where you are located in the world, LaunchHouse, based in Ohio, is looking for a few good tech entrepreneurs.

From the applications received, they will select 30 companies to attend the Techie Unconference on July 18, 2012.  The Unconference will be held at the Shaker LaunchHouse facility, and will be an opportunity to pitch to mentors, venture capitalists and the LaunchHouse team.

LaunchHouse will then select 10 teams from the 30 who attend the Unconference. These teams will participate in the twelve-week LaunchHouse Accelerator program and will receive U.S. $25,000.

Teams must be:

• Comprised of 2-3 co-founders
• Able to devote 100% to starting a business
• Ready to relocate to Cleveland during the program

Move fast.  Application deadline is July 1, 2012.
LaunchHouse home base here.  Apply here.  Good luck!

Acceptance and Respectability of Global Marketing

Photo courtesy:  ©Laurel J. Delaney

Revisiting the work of one of my favorite thought leaders who was an academic at Harvard Business School for some 30 years and started teaching marketing there at a time when, legend has it, he had never previously read a book on the subject.

That's my theory about everything, you must jump right in to master something. Similar to taking your business global!

Learn more about Theodore Levitt (they need to spell his name right) here.  And just a tad more on what folks say about him:

Levitt is sometimes credited with coining the term “globalization” in a 1983 article, “The Globalization of Markets."  Although the term had undoubtedly been in use before—The New York Times said it was used in other senses “at least as early as 1944”—it was Levitt who first popularized (marketed?) it as referring to the spread of corporations around the globe.

Related articles:

Managing Brands in Global Markets: One Size Doesn't Fit All

Global Managers:  Is There Such a Thing Anymore? 

Note:  They've corrected the misspelling of Levitt's name from Leavitt to Levitt (6/4/12 at 11:24 a.m. CDT)

Tricky Informal American Words

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How to master the finer points of American slang.

Getting comfortable with slang is essential for building relationships and communicating at work. For a manager, relying on formal English can create distance. "Without [knowing] idioms, they look at you and say, 'Oh my God, who is this woman?' " says Vladimira Gueren, 51, a former chief financial officer in Palm Coast, Fla., who moved from the Czech Republic almost four years ago.

Read the entire article here.

Tips to Obtaining a Global Trademark

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What is one of the most valuable assets of a business? Yes, people are important but so are trademarks.

Think Coca-Cola, PayPal and iPad, and you immediately think of a company, product, brand, experience, reputation, solution and public goodwill.

The article below discusses what a trademark is, how to select a trademark, how to establish rights to a trademark and where to turn for additional help.

Global Trademarks: A Start Up Guide to Global Trademarks