What are the factors leading to global competitiveness?
The other day at work, I was reading the Globe and Mail and came across this article about Professor Paul Beamish at the Richard Ivey School of Business and how he gives a pop quiz to his EMBA students on the first day of class designed to show the salience of emerging markets for businesses looking to succeed in today’s global economy. Basically in a nutshell, he asks his students to rank the top ten countries by purchasing power parity, gross national income, and population. In all the years he has taught, no student has gotten a perfect score on his test. This test shows two things: Firstly, the future direction of economic influence, and thus political power is shifting to up and coming countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia and etc and secondly, the test shows the general unfamiliarity of many people who are in business to the rapid changes happening around the world. In fact, I would argue that anyone who seeks to be globally competitive needs to understand the geopolitical, historical and economic changes happening all over, and not just be a great contributor at work. It is hard and time consuming, but it’s so essential to success. It comes as no surprise to me that Bill Gates devours every issue of The Economist cover to cover every week (according to my old boss at Edelman who has worked for him). Maybe what I’m trying to say is that many of us need to widen our perspective and try to see how everything interconnects.
What are the essential elements required for a country or a company to be globally competitive? This is a discussion that has probably been beaten to death by many think tanks, consultants and people wanting to have a great discussion but something that I’d really like to learn more about.
