How To Take Your Company To The Global Market

Deciding how to deal with the globalization of markets poses difficult questions and choices for managers. Both external business forces and internal organizational factors must be considered. External business forces revolve around the interaction of industry drivers of globalization and the different ways in which a business can be global. Internal organization factors play a major role in determining how well a firm can implement a global strategy. There are at least 5 major dimensions of globalization: 1. playing big in major markets, 2. standardizing the core product, 3. concentrating value-adding activities in a few countries, 4. adopting a uniform market position and marketing mix, and 5. integrating a competitive strategy across countries. Four factors affect the firm's ability to develop and implement global strategy: 1. organization structure, 2. management processes, 3. people, and 4. culture. A common mistake is to ignore one or more of these factors, particularly the less tangible ones such as culture.