The Borderless World

"When a sudden fluctuation in trade policy or exchange rates can turn an otherwise brilliant strategy into a seemingly irreparable hemmorage of cash, making arrangements to deal with such fluctuations must lie at the very heart of strategy."

"Too few managers consciously try to set plans and build organizations as if they saw all key customers equidistant from the corporate center."

"When global success rests in market-by-market functional strength, you have to play a series of domestic games against well-defined competitors."

"The visible clashes between companies in the marketplace, what managers frequently think of as strategy, is in reality but a small fragment of the strategic whole."

"One problem all managers face is knowing when to change course."

"Running simple but multiple projects may look inefficient from a distance, but it does not have to be."

"Why do good development people, well-trained professionals, usually stop short?"

"No company can operate effectively on a global scale by centralizing all key decisions and then farming them out for implementation."

"Once your business horizons are no longer constrained by national borders, you will probably find that many of the things that made you a first-rate competitor at home will not apply elsewhere."

"Why the reluctance of so many companies either to experiment with alliances or to stick with them long enough to learn how to make them work?"

"In a borderless world, trade figures are literally meaningless."

"Nowhere is the cost of failed or incomplete perception higher than in the distorted but still widely held view of the basic nature of international economic activity."

"When a country suffers from a provider's mentality it does not think in terms of value-added."

"We have to accept the fact that, for developing and developed economies alike, for Canada and Australia as well as for Brazil and the OPEC nations, natural resources are no longer the key to wealth."