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When the fairies all are seen;
Some black and some green,
Hey ho for Halloween!"
~ Traditional Irish Rhyme
Posted by Laurel Delaney, The Global Small Business Blog
The Definitive Blog for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses
Interested in Going Global
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Even if some funding remains in question, Michael Howard of the U.S. Export-Import Bank had good news for businesses: "There is plenty of money out there." Federal loan guarantees are available for many export businesses.
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Mrs Robinson's passion and faith left the audience capitivated and charmed. In her speech to more than 600 EMLYON students, Mrs Robinson highlighted that “The world needs leadership and especially leadership of values” saluting our School mission statement "educating entrepreneurs for the world" that gives sense to any action and project at EMLYON Business School.Patrick Molle, President of EMLYON Business School, and Jean-Luc Decornoy, Chairman of KPMG SA, presented the Award to Ms. Robinson in the presence of the official partners of the World Entrepreneurship Forum (full disclosure: I am a member).
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Understanding the culture of the parties you are negotiating with is vital in order to establish a successful business relationship.Agree? Disagree?
3). Are you adaptable, do you take risks, and can you be innovative?Back to cultural intelligence. According to Miller's article, David Livermore, executive director of the Global Learning Center in Grand Rapids, Mich., and author of "Leading with Cultural Intelligence: The New Secret to Success," has fresh insights to share on the topic. I have not read his recently published book so I cannot comment on its content.
Adaptability means that if you don’t know how different markets operate, you find out—fast. You stay sensitive to the cultural values of other countries. And if things appear one way today and another tomorrow, you shift gears and work with conditions as you find them. Creating your strategy on your feet is the only way to do global business.
The more you risk, the greater your chances for success or failure, but either way you’re pushing your limits and extending your reach. There comes a point in every initiative when you must recognize the risks and move forward anyway. Remember, you learn the most from failure, so take what chances you can afford.
Keeping the mind fresh, fertile, and open to new perspectives—the prerequisites of innovation—is a must if you want to effectively conduct business worldwide. There are endless ways of opening your mind that you can get to work on right now. View as many Web sites as possible. For example, check out www.ImprovEdge.com, which uses the techniques of improvisational theater to help executives learn to think fast, react to sudden changes, and build truly effective teams.
Beyond surfing the Internet, take long walks in unfamiliar neighborhoods. See foreign films. Meet people in other professions. Join social groups that attract members of other nationalities. Don’t withdraw when confronted with cultural differences—hang in there and ask yourself why you feel the way you do. This is real learning. Give yourself a chance to discover your own unexamined values and assumptions and you will find it a lot easier to accept others’ unfamiliar approaches!
©2001 Laurel Delaney. All rights reserved.
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... emerging markets -- defined by the company as Brazil, India, Russia, China, Vietnam, Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey and the Balkan states -- overtaking North America and Europe as the biggest overseas market for its overall consumer products by 2013.Read more about this here.
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That nearly every single person on the planet will have a global small business that hopefully will become BIG someday. This evolution will be similar to the shift from black and white television to color. If you had tried to watch black and white television for the rest of your life — which some consumers attempted to do because they didn’t have the money to buy a color set or hated change — that set someday would die. At some point, to repair it would have cost far more than a brand new color TV. So whether they liked it or not, consumers had to move with the masses and upgrade to the new color technology. They soon discovered it was the coolest invention ever and the best investment that money could buy! That’s how I envision the radical shift from small business to global small business.Find out five (5) best practices on why it's happening here.
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While Peter Drucker was alive, he sounded early warnings about sky-high executive pay, an ossified auto industry, and emerging — market threats to U.S. economic dominance. It's not too late to benefit from his advice.By Alan M. Kantrow
Peter Drucker's writings offer distilled, articulate analyses of modern business management. But, more important, they are a case study in how to think. Five leaders describe Drucker's influence on them in essays that accompany Kantrow's 1980 article.By Tammy Erickson
We're not quite there yet, but, as usual, Peter's clear vision paints a picture of a world that is looking increasingly likely.Classic Drucker Articles
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Mr. Bernanke avoided what was in many ways the elephant in the room: the value of the United States dollar. The dollar has dropped sharply in recent weeks against the euro and the Japanese yen, a move that has helped increase American exports by making them cheaper in some foreign markets. But the dollar has not budged in more than a year against China’s renminbi, which the Chinese continue to tightly manage and which many economists say remains greatly undervalued.Read more here.
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International store sales were $2.6 billion last year; roughly 19% of the company's total store sales. U.S. Online sales reached $1 billion last year.To think they started out small. It gives us all hope that we can go from global small business to BIG business. They are now in a major turn-around mode with a huge international push.
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Google says its focusing on minority languages. This includes regional, heritage, indigenous, and threatened languages. Google wants to help preserve these lesser known languages so that these smaller cultures won't be forgotten as history constantly unfolds.One of the minority languages is Māori. Read more here.
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In the U.S., the Commerce Department said Friday that the dollar value of exports, which surged in July, rose another 0.2% in August. That put exports at their highest level since December, but still 21% below year-ago levels. Lower oil imports reduced imports by 0.6%, narrowing the trade deficit to $30.7 billion after four months of widening.Read more at "Trade Upturn Hints at a Recovery."
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The simple thesis of this essay is that American society could also fail if it does not force itself to conceive of failure. The massive crises that American society is experiencing now are partly the product of just such a blindness to potential catastrophe. That is not a diagnosis I deliver with rancor. Nations, like individuals, languish when they only have uncritical lovers or unloving critics. I consider myself a loving critic of the United States, a critic who wants American society to succeed. America, I wrote in 2005 in Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World, “has done more good for the rest of the world than any other society.” If the United States fails, the world will suffer too.Read the entire article here (and don't miss out on the comments -- you might end up adding a few of your own!).
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'Every team within our building will be involved in this effort to determine what we can do now to make our trade policies more effective in helping small and medium-sized businesses, as we are in assisting ... multinational corporations,' U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk told reporters.Read more here.
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I work for a libertarian think tank, and libertarians are supposed to disdain the land of poutine and Dan Aykroyd for its socialist health-care system and general failure to really love liberty. Yet not only can you get gay-married in any of the provinces, or almost-legally toke up in your toque up there, but Canada’s economy is also slightly freer than that of the global hegemon to its south. According to the Cato Institute, at least.Read the full whimsical story here.
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