Doing business in the new world disorder: Assessing, understanding, and effectively responding to the challenges of social and poliltical instability within emerging markets

Failure to understand the social and political dynamics of countries and regions is one of the primary causes of business failures within overseas markets. In the past several years, it has cost companies billions of dollars in wasted time, effort, and investment. Succeeding within the “New World Disorder” requires that executives and managers bring new multi-disciplinary skills to their analyses of how societies react to foreign investment and change. Successfully developing areas share specific characteristics that most societies do not possess, and are unlikely to gain within any reasonable time period. In consequence, metropole development—rather than global, regional, or national development—is the rule. A key skill will lie in correctly predicting where growth is likely, and where it is not. Developing useful insights from appropriate analytical skills requires both comparative and case study competencies, a good sense of history, and a commitment to spending as much effort on mastering relevant social, political, and cultural knowledge as one spends on product development. Since the post-Cold War world is very different from the rest of the 20th century, failure to understand the nature and consequences of these differences will generate business failure well into the 21st century. Successful companies will be those that integrate traditional business skills with social science competencies to produce winning analyses of change. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.