Professors typically provide a long-term perspective of issues, campaigns, and phenomena. Addressing unprecedented times with historic embeddedness is the key purpose of this book. The past can teach us, not only by understanding what was done before us but also by appreciating the context of changes. The commentary format eliminates the major study approach. Long-term involvement with policy makers and firms has taught me that many people do not read academic books or even high-quality journal articles. Working one’s way through them is typically considered too laborious and insufficiently stimulating. However, decision makers do read short pieces, articles, and commentaries. Brevity brings attention but the quality needs to be there. Short writings bring issues to the forefront and capture attention.
Over the decades, international business and trade have mushroomed in importance. Social and economic shifts have taken us from the smoke-filled back-room discussions of experts to public disputes around the world. From ignorance, we may have entered the stage of too much information. A new sense of transparency and accountability offers new directions to businesses and their executives. The emergence of a public moral sense and scrutiny about injustices in connection with many international issues encourages companies and governments to reduce corruption and abandon unsavory practices.
The role of government has changed drastically, first shrinking in the 1980s and 1990s, but now coming back with a vengeance, dictating the direction and strength of international business activities. After decades of aiming for more open markets, even the liberal trading nations and the trade-supporting politicians within them are developing a tendency to restrict imports and encourage exports. In blatant disregard that someone’s export has to be someone else’s import, governments try to keep home industries protected and their own economies stable and revitalized. Yet, global imbalances are persistent and distortive. We can distinguish patterns of ebb and flow in the international business and trade arena. Today, we often find the claim that “if it’s not on Google it doesn’t exist.” However, long-term observers recognize that, just like Saint Augustine, who prayed “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet,” policy makers and executives often develop strong and nontransparent measures to delay or even defeat the easing of international trade and investment flows. There are also the times where change cannot happen quickly enough, where everyone aims to streamline and fast track legislation.
There are subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle efforts at sanctions and disruptions of trade flows. They are often met by opposing interest levels, which are often from historical developments. When one side loses contracts, blame falls on the corruption and nepotism on part of the winners. Yet, culture may be seen as an obligation to provide for family.
One discusses and often evaluates the meaning and adjustment of key business pillars such as risk, competition, profit, and ownership, which perhaps gradually prepares us for a new environment. Many of today’s business executives discover that their activities are but one integral component of society. Politics, security, and religion are only some of the other dimensions that historically, and maybe again in the future, are held in possibly higher esteem than economics and business by society at large. Those who argue based on business principles alone may increasingly find themselves on the losing side.
Each chapter in this book contains opportunities to chew on pressing issues. I hope that the opportunity for comparisons, the recognition of the presence both of rapid shifts and also of permanence, and the appreciation that in many instances the future was 2,000 years ago, provides for good stimuli. Be it for bedtime reading, for beefing up on a topic before a “wise table dinner,” or just for racking the brain, I wish you well with these pages.
Washington, DC