Posts tagged “globalization”

Twitter, email, IM: American colleagues, Trinidadian friends in Turkey, my brother in London, a Ukrainian who might be in Paris, British friends at work. All while having lunch in San Francisco. I'm pretty plugged in.

Moving between continents means wrestling with global banks that are global in name only. Citibank's West Coast branches operate like a completely different bank because, until 2002, they were. Scale creates complexity, complexity kills efficiency, and globalization turns out to be naturally self-limiting. My banking nightmare proves it.

I dissect a passionate anti-Tesco rant point by point, revealing how each complaint about the supermarket giant is really just globalization working as intended: bigger stores, cheaper food, greater access, fewer arbitrary national boundaries. The real villain here is nostalgia, not progress.

Based on conversations with my dad, a multinational executive, I argue globalization is self-limiting. As companies standardized products globally, they lost market share to local brands better suited to regional tastes. Past a certain point, uniformity hurts profits, meaning globalization stabilizes rather than endlessly expanding and homogenizing culture.

I attended Davos and got rare full access. The mood was grim: global economic collapse feared, anti-American sentiment intense, Al Qaeda largely dismantled but franchised, and Iraq war universally dreaded. The world's 5,000 rulers are smart, naive, arrogant, and very, very worried.