Asia

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.

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

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 […]

Are you prepared?

B V Krishnamurthy is the Director and Executive Vice-President of Alliance Business Academy in Bangalore, India. The Indian economy is likely to grow at 9% in 2008. The challenge is to aspire for and achieve a 12-to-14% growth that alone can take the country to an economic power status by 2020. Some of the imperatives […]

One firm in India wanted to understand what leads workers to make unsafe choices, and why unsafe conditions go unreported.

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, […]

Working product by product and country by country to develop the region’s digital economy

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 […]

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 […]

The Idea: Ten years into an ambitious advertising campaign, Aflac still had low name recognition. Would a noisy duck do any better?

The widely-held notion of the USA as the land of opportunity could not have received a better boost than the election of the first African-American President. His march from relatively humble origins to the most powerful office in the world has been nothing short of spectacular. Grit, determination and an unrelenting focus as the ultimate […]

The regional hub has to address structural issues.

Since this is a presidential election year, there is a lot of discussion lately in US public-policy circles on ways to restore America’s waning science and technology lead in the globalized post-American economy. Pointing to China’s growing R&D expenditure and India’s large technical workforce, leading think-tanks are recommending that the US increase its R&D investments […]

Corporate executives with risk exposure in China would do well to follow the Chinese stock market very carefully as it is one of the best leading indicators of business conditions over the next one to four quarters. And right now, the Chinese stock market continues to flash multiple warning signs of a sharp economic slowdown. […]

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 […]

Yang Jianguo was promoted from country manager for China to global head of product development at a staid French perfume maker. How to shed some biases and win over his Western, tradition-bound colleagues—while still breathing new life into an aging product line?

Mirror, mirror, on the wall - who's the fairest of them all? That's the question most economists are asking. Many answer China, a few holdouts contend:...

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 […]