A Chevron lobbyist told Newsweek this summer,
“The ultimate issue here is Ecuador has mistreated a U.S. company. We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this-companies that have made big investments around the world.”
Referring to the class-action lawsuit in Ecuador against Chevron for dumping resulting in massive destruction of the rainforest (and its inhabitants).
Deep breath. Many, many deep breaths.
Pictured: Emilia Dominguez and the rest of the Lionbridge team in South Africa summit alongside Microsoft, local NGO's and entrepreneurs.
Last month I had the opportunity to moderate a World Affairs Council talk with Rob Salkowitz. Rob is the author of Young World Rising, a book chronicling the increasingly ubiquitous trend of young entrepreneurs doing good. Rob’s focus is in emerging markets, where the developed world’s problem of a shrinking workforce is turned upside down and the trend is actually in the direction of a fast-growing, young and educated workforce, far outnumbering the outgoing generation.
Just as I start to think I’m getting a good handle on this world of the small business owner, Rob comes along and opens the doors to this entirely new world, which I am embarrassed to say should hardly be “new.” I work in globalization for pete’s sake! My team is on the forefront of helping large enterprise enter into emerging markets in areas previously considered to be rather unlikely, like sub-saharan Africa.
Why then, is this a “new” world? First, let me confess to thinking of globalization in the terms that I’ve grown up seeing in this industry, which is to say, large multinationals from developed nations selling their products around the world, for profit.
And yet, in the hours after January’s Haiti earthquake, it was not large enterprise but rather the dozen or so Africans behind Ushahidi, on the ground making an impact first. Ushahidi is an ambitious project started by a Kenyan blogger in her 20′s, designed to quickly provide access and mapped views of eyewitness reports of crises in difficult-to-reach places. Within hours of the first tremors in Haiti, Ushahidi and its partners were gathering real-time information for first responders, resulting in a crisis map that saved countless lives.
Indeed as my father likes to say, when you buy a red car, suddenly the streets are filled with red cars! My red car is this rising Young World, and lately everywhere I look, including the multitude of partners and vendors I am privileged to work with, I see a very different kind of globalization rising. I see globalization fueled by a growing, educated army of creative entrepreneurs schooled outside the famous business schools of the US and Europe. And this generation of entrepreneurs are not content with simply making a profit, but in fact are building solutions to critical problems facing their, emerging world. I see globalization originating in these previously ‘unlikely’ seeming places and I see no good reason for those products and services not to be headed straight to my neighborhood, someday very soon.
A dynamic is changing and the global flow of innovation may be shifting right before our eyes. Are we ready? As consumers, are we ready? As investors and people in the business of enabling business, are we poised to help?
With 45% of today’s global population never knowing a time without cell phones and personal computing (3 billion people under the age of 24) I start to wonder how much value there is in teaching our tried and true old business practices, and whether we all wouldn’t be best served by focusing our energy instead, on giving this rising tide of innovators a platform to show us the road ahead?
Tonight was a typical day in the life of a Global Misfit. I was at a fabulous event hosted by Lionbridge at Localization World (full disclosure, I am totally biased here, remember who I work for) . No matter how many years pass in this industry, I never cease to be amazed by the eccentric company I’m lucky enough to keep.
We celebrated in a great bowling alley space and the party was, at least on the surface, not unlike any other Silicon Valley conference …with one rather notable exception, in the form of an army of global citizens we had the privilege of hosting, such as:
As I walked around the room full of the wild cast of characters, I was reminded of an article I read yesterday on Noreena Hertz. In it she says she believes “in a globalist agenda, but globalization isn’t just allowing companies to trade freely all over the world. It’s about what rights and responsibilities come with that.”
And I couldn’t help but wonder how one might go about bottling the collective wisdom in tonight’s room full of multilingual, global misfits. If it’s true that you have to walk in another person’s shoes to truly have empathy, then no one understands better than this group, the rights and responsibilities that come with globalization. Most have lived it first hand, and live it every day.
And at the end of the day, reaching people in the global market is -at it’s very core- about connecting and understanding people’s culture, language, and tastes…which is what empathy is all about, right?
All that to say, I realized tonight, I’m in the business of empathy! It’s not about going global, it’s about getting local…and empathy is the key doing it, and doing it well.
Peace.
Interesting image posted by @bonnevivante on Twitter. I love to see how different people receive and interpret messages like this, and wonder if the “go global” idea still retains it’s mystique or if it’s being morphed into something altogether different from the old Coca Cola, Disney and McDonald’s paradigms.
What does this image do/say for you?
Expand Globally - Argentina
