The commercial managerial process is twofold: First, it provides strategic planning for institutions; second, it creates relationships within and without organizations to assist in achieving such goals. To arrive at these conjoined considerations requires managerial decision makers to acknowledge that everything has a history, nothing evolves in a vacuum. This axiom is especially important in conducting business on a global scale. Given the extensive degree and scale across the world, commercial process requires an introduction into the roots of globalization.
The lessons of the past can be instrumental in planning for the future. Knowing how strategic business principles came to be established between people in alien territories is a vital complement to the educational skills and abilities the modern manager must possess. The concepts used today in all business disciplines developed from a myriad of ideas, techniques, and applications composed by ancient civilizations from around the world as they dealt with the creation of a workable exchange system. Because they emerged in a more simplistic world, one can cut through the minutia and concentrate on the core problems they addressed as the basic issues faced today are the same fundamental considerations before. Even modern analytical models confirm the strategic decision making of ancient merchants.
In the modern era of globalization, bringing diverse groups of business people together into a cohesive global unit has never been so important. This managerial function demands an inspection into their historic commercial relationships with each other. While the world is today more technically universal, it was constructed on a human historical foundation. Appreciating this base, on which all was built, allows one to reach new levels of accomplishment.
My own international executive experience taught me that in constructing the globalization of my own company’s interests a key element to keep in mind is that different territorial and hence cultural groups were always combining. It was a practice that has always existed. U.S. firms and their managerial cadre are the new guys on the block. We are interlopers in a system that others used centuries ago and we need to be respectful of what came before our entrance into the global commercial club. I am mindful of the phrase often uttered by my business colleagues around the world during my executive tenure days: “You guys didn’t invent business, the world has been practicing it since recorded history. We do know something about it. Sometimes we even forget this consideration but you shouldn’t.”
Commerce expanded around the globe, joining societies in the ancient world into unsophisticated by arguably economic alliances as well as economic conflicts. The remnants of these historic events are still in evidence today. How ancient merchants manipulated the emergence of the commercially globalized world provides lessons for the modern inheritors of this never ending process.
When taken together, a simple conclusion emerges. Globalization is the historic story of the spreading and widening of the natural human exchange process, a commercialization of the basic need for reciprocity between people. It is a factual testament to John Donne’s quote, “No man is an island unto himself”;1 the desire to connect with others is at the core of humanity.
The more salient points of the book can be summarized as follows:
- The process of exchange is a natural, inborn human trait that no other species on Earth emulates. The primeval basic desire of all men to exchange the fruits of their labors or specialized abilities for those of others is a natural social condition of the human psyche. It is part of our social ritual that continues in the present day as the prime impetus to bring people together. This was first evidenced in the process of collective action in adjunct with survival instincts when men worked together to protect themselves from the harshness of their environments, and even each other. Such fundamental societal individual behavior resulted in the barter system, the division of labor, and expanded when the idea of creating a surplus beyond one’s immediate needs was realized and the excess offered for trade. The same fundamental commercial onus exits today.
- Every society trades and the cross territorial experience contributed to the development of civilization. Merchant traders were the first ambassadors of cultural change and their influence continues to this day. Their activities provided for, and still account toward, the impetus for physical infrastructure development and technological advances even in the modern world. As merchants crossed over through new territories, creating intercontinental paths on land and water in their pursuit of the exchange of goods, they provided the avenues for swapping not just foreign resources; their activities propelled the growth of a cross-cultural dialogue that in turn furthered intellectual progress. On the rails of commerce the world grew as ideas, inventions, and religion-based philosophical beliefs were also transferred, borrowed, and copied in the process.
- Ancient merchants introduced the principles of business that are still in use today, from rules of commercial engagement to the creation of institutions that carry them out. Universal marketing methodology as well as international sales networks and logistics were historically practiced along with the creation of global strategic alliances using repetitive middlemen transactions; all of these tactics are still employed in the present.
- All religions, as a social behavioral instrument, recognized the need to incorporate in their teachings the element of rightful exchange of things between people and their doctrines still in use today contain such directional guidance. At times the Church even participated in the trade affairs of nations and was an active partner in commercial exploration of the globe.
- Governments, in varying degrees, have always supported the commercial process. From the creation of standardized measurements to the establishment of mediums of exchange to the enactment and enforcement of laws, state regimes have, and continue to be, a collateral factor in the world of commerce. Their foreign policies not only reflected the importance of the financial resources it provided, but their combined influence on the world stage has altered history to the benefit and detriment of people. Such joint considerations still exist, and their interplay directs the lives of the world’s population.
Wisdom comes from appreciating how and why things developed. It is as important as the end knowledge provided by them. Understanding commercial history is a valued mechanism that global executives should have in their managerial educational skill collection as it often provides the key to unlocking the complicated, multifaceted global world. Managers who study the past will be better prepared for the future. In too many textbooks and articles the word “globalization” is defined by the results it produces as opposed to the mechanism it really is. The term should be used to describe a universal instrument that grew out of a naturally occurring, ordered exchange process. Its maturity was fueled by commonly shared denominators of value across and between social groups around the world. Such meaning properly recognizes it as a socially induced system that is inherent in all cultures and acts as a binding agent across and between cultures. It is a method to help manage the affairs of human beings, a socially engineered apparatus to provide for the mutual but not always equal need attainment. It began in ancient times and continues in the present. Its scope and degree in the modern era of civilization have resulted in a more advanced borderless economic world as demonstrated by the interdependence of nations and exemplified by increasing traverse territorial commercial trade and investment around the world.