The Globalization Process and The Enterprise

Globalization is a complex and well-publicized phenomenon that leads to constant declarations and frequent actions and whose correct interpretation requires a strong dose of strategic logic. Declarations abound of the type ‘in order to succeed, a company needs global scope’. Furthermore, important actions follow those statements: in the year 2000 alone, the investments of companies in countries other than their own totalled more than a thousand billion dollars. In that same year, non-British companies invested more than £84 billion in Britain. These are not just macroeconomic statistics: behind these figures, there are hundreds of individual decisions made by companies to invest their resources, always scarce, in establishing operations beyond their borders. It is important, therefore, to understand what the strategic implications of the phenomenon known as ‘globalization’ are. To do this, it may be useful to start with a simple definition, since the meaning of the term varies enormously according to who uses it. In fact, it is interesting to observe that the meaning of the term ‘globalization’ is charged with very different connotations in different countries.