Question

The information reported in the WSJ article, Aramco Emerges Ahead of Apple as World’s Most Profitable Company, illustrates how we are impacted by global events and actions. In consideration of our study of International Management Perspectives, consider and respond to the following:

Questions:

Part A: Should we swallow our American Pride, or is this par for the course in global business? Explain.

Part B: Is there something we can learn about global brand and/or corporate dominance?

Part C: Provide any other observations that may be relative to this topic.

Answer 1

I don’t think we are as par with global business, we need to swallow our American pride. Building startups across countries is not easy. There are lots of barriers – language, distance, time zones, culture. But the biggest obstacle is in our minds. It is the idea that we have to do everything ourselves.

This is why my favorite startup advice comes from Bill Withers.

Please, swallow your pride, If I have things you need to borrow, For no one can fill those of your needs, That you won’t let show, You just call on me, brother, when you need a hand, We all need somebody to lean on, I just might have a problem that you’ll understand, We all need somebody to lean on.

For each country, the natural innovation partners might be in other countries nearby. Another natural partner is a big ecosystem, like Silicon Valley. But many of the world’s most important problems don’t exist in the US market, or the US is not the best place to start solving them.

As the largest ecosystem outside of the US, it makes sense for Israel to become a key hub for innovation across countries aimed at big problems that don’t start with the US market

There a lot of things that countries can do to speed up the process. But the biggest untapped opportunity is also the most basic: don’t do it alone. We should be building startups across countries.

Greg Rockson. He’s from Ghana. He’s building a great startup called mPharma – allowing doctors to write digital prescriptions. He’s rolling this out in three African countries now, but he’s building the company partly in Israel. So this is a Ghanaian-Israeli startup, building on the strengths of both countries.

Another case is MindLab. This company started with some Israelis who realized games of strategy could teach things that are not normally taught in school. Like strategic thinking, decision making, emotional intelligence.

The Israeli company was very innovative but going nowhere – until a Brazilian name Valmir Pereira found them. He figured out how to sell it to the Brazilian school system – something that the Israelis could never have done on their own. Now there are a million kids in Brazil using this system and MindLab is becoming a global company, based in Brazil and Israel.

Skype is another huge example. Its seven founders came from four countries: Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, and the US. Could this be part of the reason why Skype became such a huge success story?

Perhaps the biggest example of the power of combining the strengths of people from different countries is Silicon Valley itself. Look at this crazy map showing where the Valley’s talent comes from. Over half of the founders in Silicon Valley are immigrants.

The future is moving from globalization of rich world-originated innovation to a world of co-innovation. There is a global race to build each region’s leading innovation sector.

We have no idea who will win in each region. Will it be China, Korea, Vietnam, India or Singapore? Will it be Kenya, Rwanda, or South Africa? Will it be Colombia, Chile, Mexico or Peru?

Here’s what I predict: the countries that do a better job of innovating with other countries will do best in this global race. Startups — and innovation with larger companies — are a team sport. But the teams should not just be from the same country. Just as different people have different strengths, different countries have different strengths. The countries that do a better job of combining their strengths could be the winners.

Israel is perfectly positioned to embrace such a vision but is far from acting on it. We are a surprisingly multi-cultural, multilingual country because we have people here from a hundred countries around the world. At the same time, many of our founding teams met in the same army unit.