Juan Antonio Enciso
On April 20, in a session at the Global Network for Advanced Management Fifth Anniversary Symposium, a panel of experts, including former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, will lead a discussion of the future of globalization and the implications for business and management education. Watch the discussion live.
Globalization encouraged companies to design and implement their business strategies to take advantage of the competitiveness of each region, configuring and adapting the value of their supply chains in manufacturing, investment, and trade. It’s clear that the global value chains took years to configure, with the flexibility to respond quickly to changes in technology and consumer trends, and regulations and financial cycles, among many other global economic factors.
However, this status seems to be facing challenges, mostly from political events and apparent anti-globalization postures in several countries, including the U.S., the U.K., and many others around the world. The question that arises is how these politically led movements and governments will impact the competitiveness of the current global value configuration? In practice, what does it mean in terms of changes to regulations and benefits of trade and direct-investment agreements, double-taxation treaties, property-rights protection, environmental regulations, and quality standards, among many other economic factors that define the feasibility of both production and consumption?
The impact of the future of globalization or anti-globalization depends on several factors. Some of these factors are the political and economic views of the new generation of leaders and governments on how profound and deep the changes in trade and foreign-direct investment regulations will be, new tax configurations, changes in rules of origin within trade agreements, environmental and logistics regulations, and the non-trade-related issues that governments would probably like to tie to trade, such as immigration, security, border crossings, and democratic processes, among other issues.
How will this new status quo impact a trade-dependent country like Mexico? It depends on how fast governments and companies come to understand their current situation and potential changes, the effectiveness of their capacity to change their global value chains to maintain their competitiveness, and their capacity to negotiate or renegotiate trade regulations with potential partners. We need to remember that changes in a global supply do not come about from one day to the next; it might take years before a company can reconfigure its sourcing, manufacturing process, logistics planning, and so on.
There is no time to waste. The business leaders of multinational and domestic companies must be prepared to understand and evaluate the business environment, to foresee the possible changes, to evaluate challenges and economic impact; they must be able to reconfigure management and organizations, be assertive negotiators with governments as well as with suppliers and customers, and to evaluate and design new processes, products, and customer-service management.
