No company is an island!

Kiron Kasbekar
09 March 1999

A little less than a decade ago, an American computer company launched an ad campaign showing a futuristic, space-age city, with hover cars flying around buildings connected by skywalks. The company released quarter-page colour ads in the Financial Times, London, which then used very little colour on its pages. The ads carried the slogan: "The future is not what it used to be!"

Those words, so often used to indulge in nostalgia about the past, were used so aptly to describe the rapid changes that were taking place in the world and were transforming the landscape and shifting the horizons beyond our imagination.

World business has changed dramatically in the past decade and a half -- with landmark events such as the privatisation of British Telecom, the merger of Asea and Brown Boveri, the complete transformation of the fibres, commodity plastics, chemicals and steel industries in Europe. And don't forget the attack of the seemingly invincible Japanese on one Western industry after another -- from automobiles to electronics.

Almost all of a sudden, the Koreans rose to challenge the Japanese, and the Taiwanese were not far behind. And the Americans, who at one time seemed to be all but ready to cede more industries to the Eastern invaders, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and turned the tables on the Japanese.

Other countries, especially in South East Asia, were quietly building their own industrial strengths. Not in any way comparable in technological terms with the big industrial powers, the Malaysians, the Thais, the Indonesians built manufacturing strengths in a host of industries and raised the standard of living of their peoples.

China was not far behind. Beginning with its capitalistic outposts in areas like Shenzhen in the south, the Chinese attracted massive sums of foreign funds and began modernising and expanding their industry.