On difficult days—the days when no one wants to speak with us, meet with us, or return our calls—we are tempted to wax nostalgic about doing business in the good old days. We harken back to when the banker and the equipment dealer knew every farmer within a fifty-mile radius. Getting heard today in a maddeningly noisy global marketplace can seem ridiculously hard.

Surprisingly, though, this is not purely a twenty-first century problem. Open since 1455, the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, Turkey, attracts over 250,000 shoppers every day of the year (except on religious holidays) in search of bargains on everything from clothing to jewelry to rugs to food and groceries. The frenetic backdrop of haggled prices shouted back and forth colors each purchase. The Bazaar is a crazy tangle of four thousand shops underneath sixty-one covered streets vying for your attention. With so much competition, vendors often resort to aggressive tactics to get the attention of passers-by before they disappear into the next vendor's shop. For example, a carpet dealer may try to guess your nationality in an attempt to get you to stop walking. Or he may attach himself to you at the Blue Mosque to be your unofficial guide for the day.

Standing out in the global economy of expert services can seem as daunting a task as trying to sell carpets in the Grand Bazaar, but don't despair.

Despite the 24/7/365 global nature of shopping on the Internet, former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill's adage that “All politics is local” applies to business as well. Doug likes to tell his university students that “business is a social sport.” As social animals, we prefer to hire those we know. That said, just because commerce is local doesn't mean that it isn't global at the same time. It sounds contradictory, but it's not. Take the Silk Road, for example.

Long before the Grand Bazaar, there was the 4,350-mile east to west route known today as the Silk Road. According to historians, the Silk Road routes began about 200 BC and eventually connected eastern Asia with India, the Middle East, and Africa, and finally Europe. The reason the Silk Road exited was commerce, but along the way, cultures, languages, religions, and technologies were exchanged as well. The Chinese traded with Indians, the Persians with the Greeks, and the Romans with the Turkmens. They sold silk, spices, vegetables, fruit seeds, horses, rugs, clothing, and jewelry. Metaphorically, the Silk Road was the first Internet—connective tissue that linked peoples across geography.

Despite the fact that the Silk Road may have been the first glimmer of what would become a global economy, all commerce was conducted locally between people who knew each other, village-by-village and city-by-city. If you wanted to trade your Indian cardamom for silk from China, you traveled to the next village and traded with people you respected and trusted, who in turn, did the same thing one stop up the road. Your cardamom would be passed up the trade routes like an Olympic flame handed from one torch bearer to the next until it found an ultimate consumer.

Today, with a credit card and access to the Internet, we can go online and buy a rare book from a bookstore in India, or a handmade merino sweater from a vendor in Tibet. But when it comes to hiring an architect, an HR specialist, or a web developer, we typically look to people that are at best two or three degrees separated from ourselves. This is one of the reasons why global service firms spend considerable sums of money on networks of offices around the world. These firms know, instinctively, that they need to be close to their clients. Or, as a proxy, they must be willing to spend a lot of time on a phone or an airplane.

Take AECOM, for example. AECOM may not be a household name, but you know their work. The Los Angeles–based firm has 87,500 employees and revenue of more than seventeen billion dollars. For those of us who struggle to remember names, AECOM's founders were kind to us. AECOM is an acronym for architecture, engineering, consulting, operations, and maintenance. It is consistently voted as one of the best design, engineering, and architectural firms by those in the industry.

AECOM is a global company. A quick look at some of its projects speaks to their reach:

• World Trade Center
• Central–Wan Chai Bypass
• China National Convention Center
• Moses Mabhida Stadium
• Los Angeles Stadium at Hollywood Park
• Abu Dhabi International Airport
• Cape Town Stadium
• Hong Kong International Airport
• Delhi Jal Board Sewage System
• Brisbane City Hall
• Taizhou Yangtze River Bridge
• Barclays Center
• AT&T Stadium
• The Royal Bank of Scotland
• Logan International Airport

But like most global companies, AECOM understands that it must work through its local offices. Developers and government officials buy from those with whom they have spent time rubbing elbows. As a result, AECOM has hundreds of offices around the world, organized around five global hubs: North/South America, Europe, Asia, Middle East, and Australia/New Zealand. It has over a dozen offices in China alone, including a presence in Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Nanchang, and Shanghai. AECOM is a global company but it understands that identifying interest and building trust requires proximity to clients.