Next Global Stage: The: Challenges and Opportunities in Our...

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 312 pages
• Published by: Wharton School Publishing March 27, 2005
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 013147944X
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0131479449
• Book Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Weighs: 1.1 pounds

Product Review


Harvard Business Review's Review of The Next Global Stage

The Next Global Stage:Challenges and Opportunities in Our Borderless World
Kenichi Ohmae
(Wharton School Publishing, 2005)

In the early 1900s, German physicist Werner Heisenberg laid the foundations for quantum mechanics, a set of rules showing that at the subatomic level Newtonian physics was irrelevant. Just as quantum mechanics upstaged Newton, says strategist Kenichi Ohmae, a radical new model is upending old notions about the global economy. In this sprawling book, Ohmae warns that governments, businesses, and leaders that cling to their Newtonian approaches will become irrelevant themselves.

The heart of Ohmae's thesis will be familiar to readers of his previous books, including The Borderless World (1990) and The Invisible Continent (2000): In the new global economy, the nation-state, and the protectionist economic thinking that goes with it, is obsolete. Nation-states have borders, armies, flags, currencies, and a development-stifling instinct to protect their economies from the outside world. As global economic players, they're being displaced by "region states"-borderless centers of vibrant economic activity that welcome global trade and investment, like the Shutoken metropolitan area of Japan and Guangzhou in China.

If the rules of the old economy no longer apply, Ohmae ventures, then neither do the old rules of business. Fair enough. The problem is, he says, no one knows, or can know, what the new rules are: "By the time any rule book or user's manual appearsthe 'new rules' will already be obsolete." What business leaders can be sure of, Ohmae argues, is that massive change without requires massive change within. That means wall-to-wall rethinking of corporate mission, strategy, and organization. Companies must cut loose from their "ancestry" and, for instance, compete by selling the very products that threaten them. Clinging to the core, as Kodak did in the face of predation by digital-camera makers, is a recipe for failure in this new age.

Companies must cast off their sentimental attachment to the nation-states where they're headquartered and jettison their hierarchies and old approaches to markets. Their leaders must become visionary facilitators without preconceived attitudes about their roles-ready to embrace even the idea that the best leader may be a team, not an individual. There can be no half measures in this radical transformation, Ohmae says, no testing the waters before taking the plunge.

It's a strong prescription. Unfortunately, this lively book can't, by its own admission, give business readers what they want most: practical advice for competing in the global economy. But it does remind executives to pry their gaze from the present and set it firmly on the future. As Heisenberg well understood, the more doggedly you map where a moving target is, the less you know about where it's headed.

-Gardiner Morse

Product Description


Globalization is a fact. You can't stop it; it has already happened; it is here to stay. And we are moving into a new global stage.

A radically new world is taking shape from the ashes of yesterday's nation-based economic world. To succeed, you must act on the global stage, leveraging radically new drivers of economic power and growth. Legendary business strategist Kenichi Ohmae—who in The Borderless World, published in 1990, predicted the rise and success of globalization, coining the very word—synthesizes today's emerging trends into the first coherent view of tomorrow's global economy—and its implications for politics, business, and personal success.

Ohmae explores the dynamics of the new "region state," tomorrow's most potent economic institution, and demonstrates how China is rapidly becoming the exemplar of this new economic paradigm. The Next Global Stage offers a practical blueprint for businesses, governments, and individuals who intend to thrive in this new environment. Ohmae concludes with a detailed look at strategy in an era where it's tougher to define competitors, companies, and customers than ever before.

As important as Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, as fascinating as Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree, this book doesn't just explain what's already happened: It offers a roadmap for action in the world that's beginning to emerge.

• New economics for a borderless world
  Why Keynes' and Milton Friedman's economics are history—and what might replace them
• Leveraging today's most powerful platforms for growth
  From Windows to English to your global brand
• Technology: driving business death—and rebirth
  Anticipating technological obsolescence—and jumping ahead of it
• Government in the post-national era
  What government can do when nation-states don't matter
• Leadership and strategy on the global stage
  Honing your global vision and global leadership skills

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Reader Reviews
I have not in my lifetime seen a table of contents more exquisitely detailed and provocative. My very first note on this book reads: "TOC: Holy Cow!" This book earned five stars with the table of contents and got better from there. I recommend that this book be read AFTER reading C.K. Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks) (a book that I earnestly hope wins the author the Nobel Peace Prize), and Stuart Hart's Capitalism at the Crossroads: Aligning Business, Earth, and Humanity (2nd Edition) (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks) Whereas those two books are essential background and strategically transformative, showing the four trillion in potential revenue from four billion people whose individual disposable income averages $10 a year, this book is more operational, a handbook for global profit. The section on reinventing economics is a very useful preamble to the remainder of the book, where the author dissects both governments and business practices before going on to discuss platforms for progress inclusive of technologies and languages. The last third of the book provides the "script" for future global prosperity. The most valuable and actionable pages are from 255-268, where the author concisely identifies the following areas as potential break-out zones for enormous profit: Hainan Island, Petropavlosk-Kamchatsily in Russia, Vancouver and British Columbia, the Baltic Corner, Ho Chi Minh City, Khabarovsk, Maritime (Primorye) Province and Sakhalin Island in Russia, Sau Paulo, and Kyushu in Japan. If I were a major multinational interested in doubling my gross and profit in the next ten years, I would immediately commission a single General Manager for each of these areas, and send them to build an indigenous networked business from scratch in each of these areas. The author, who I am reminded wrote "The Mind of the Strategist" as a young man in the 1970's, has an extraordinay intellect that has been very ably applied to a most important topic: creating stabilizing wealth. Wharton School Publishing has impressed me greatly with these three books. I have toyed with earning a third graduate degree in either environmental economics or Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) business management, and while I will probably not do so, what these three books make clear to me is that Wharton is a happening place and clearly making a difference. Good stuff!