World Out of Balance: Navigating Global Risks to Seize Competitive Advantage

by Paul A. Laudicina

Overview

Understanding, planning for, and thriving in the global business environment

Business leaders face a global environment that is increasingly complex and treacherous. Written by the managing director of A.T. Kearney's prestigious Global Policy Institute, World Out of Balance draws upon the insights of an elite group of business leaders, academics, and government officials from around the world, focusing on the five factors that are shaping tomorrow's business environment:

• Globalization--rising levels of trade, communication, and travel
• Demographics--slowed population growth in developed countries, and increased growth in the third world
• Consumption Patterns--increasingly diverse consumer markets, causing fierce market competition
• Natural Resources and Environment--oil markets reaching a crisis stage, and other shortages predicted in the coming decades
• Regulation and Activism--calls for greater regulation point to long-term business challenges

With intelligence and insight, World Out of Balance provides executives, consultants, and business thinkers with the high caliber of information and insight you need to plan for, rather than react to, important emerging trends shaping the global business environment. Author Paul Laudicina offers compelling snapshots of key trends and how they may evolve in the years ahead--and provides practical scenarios and expert guidelines to help you prepare your organizations to meet these challenges and profit by them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780071460590
Publisher:	McGraw Hill LLC
Publication date:	12/21/2004
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Paul A. Laudicina is vice president and managing director of the Global Business Policy Council at A.T. Kearney, a forum of CEOs, thought leaders, and government officials.

Editorial Reviews

World Out of Balance is a call to action to the corporate community to understand the external world in order to engage it. It explains why companies should develop their own structured, dynamic processes for reading the signs of change in a complex and often perplexing world, with at least one eye firmly directed toward the future. The objective is to sort false signals from meaningful developments so business leaders can anticipate and prepare for changes with the greatest potential impact on business operations down the road.

In World Out of Balance, Paul A. Laudicina, the managing director of A.T. Kearney's prestigious Business Policy Council, provides a practical framework for making sense of changes in the external environment and offers straightforward scenarios of how the future global business environment might evolve. His framework is based on what he has identified as five primary drivers of change - globalization, demographics, the new consumer, natural resources and the environment, and regulation and activism. Laudicina argues that today's earth-shattering events are fundamentally different from those of previous eras of history, as technologies are collapsing distance and spawning unprecedented global interdependence. Only a disciplined strategy will embolden corporate management to engage the world and seize the many opportunities it presents.

A Call to Action
Not long ago, most leading companies had possessed strong in-house capabilities for monitoring changes in the external environment. Companies like Royal Dutch/Shell pioneered increasingly sophisticated risk management and strategic planning functions to balance the considerable opportunities they saw overseas with the enhanced vulnerability to social and political unrest, economic upheaval, and natural disasters to which global expansion exposed them.

Rounds of cost cutting and corporate restructuring took their toll on strategic planning departments in the 1980s, and a decade of "benign globalization" in the 1990s shaped an exuberant worldview among a new generation of business leaders. Many believed that careful planning against external exigencies was largely unnecessary for success in global markets. As a result, most companies today lack the means to identify and manage external risks and find themselves without bearings in this increasingly complex world.

External Uncertainties and Shocks
Business leaders do not need to be paralyzed. Companies can - and should - undertake expansion strategies even when external uncertainties and shocks can have as much impact as traditional industry dynamics. With the most promising opportunities located outside home markets, hiding from risks is not an option. Instead, companies must bring insights about the external environment into the planning process in order to spot and act on new opportunities and avoid emerging threats. The key to this approach is plotting the five drivers that are most likely to shape the global business environment. The five drivers - globalization, demographics, consumer needs, natural resources and environment, and regulation and activism - are interdependent but not always mutually reinforcing.

Strategic Risk Management
Companies are turning to strategic risk management to improve outcomes while continuing to actively engage a volatile global business environment. More than just a checklist of safety measures, a strategic risk management approach identifies the core processes that drive a company's earnings and monitors both internal processes and external events to ensure that risk and reward are continually re-evaluated and rebalanced. The ultimate goal is, through an iterative process, to help companies evaluate their risk management process in the context of a structured "stages of excellence" approach.

The dynamic drivers of the 21st century business conditions - imbued and turbo-charged by extraordinary, ever-expansive technological innovation - underlie a world of continuous change and volatility. Those who fail to rigorously plan for and seize this future are abdicating their responsibility to their shareholders and stakeholders.

Stewards of the successful global corporation will not keep their corporate vessel docked at their home port waiting for calmer seas. Rather, with a constant eye on the telltale signs of changing conditions, and with all the expert input possible from a good crew and instrumentation alike, today's successful executive will ride the winds of change, meet the challenges they present, and realize the potential of these new global realities. Copyright © 2005 Soundview Executive Book Summaries

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