Feb 04 2008
Around the World in So Many Ways
This past Saturday David Churbuck posted about a new blog authored by Reid Walker, VP of Global Communications at Lenovo. Walker’s blog is focused on the topic of Worldsourcing. Reid deserves an “attaboy” for devoting an entire blog to an increasingly important topic.
“What is Worldsourcing? Walker defines it as:
Increasingly, we live in a world with just one time zone and business must source materials, innovation, talent, logistics, infrastructure, and production wherever they are best available. And they must sell wherever profitable markets exist, anywhere in the world. In a nutshell, that’s worldsourcing — a business strategy that taps global diversity and resources and distributes management, operations, processes, and production to create more efficiencies wherever they will function best to deliver the best value to customers. Worldsourcing is not about cutting costs, it’s really about growing your company’s value by leveraging the right expertise in the right places to identify and serve markets in both developed and emerging markets.
This got me thinking about the SAP Global Survey and how it was predicated on a similar idea — that being — a global company must understand the global marketplace and all of its diversity to be capable of actively participating in that global marketplace. The “Survey” is in effect, the Worldsourcing of how social media impacts business and culture around the globe. With that understanding, we can then leverage our resources in the right ways, in the right places and with the right people to deliver value to all of the markets we serve.
