Borderless world : power and strategy in the interlinked economy

Kenichi Ohmae's The Borderless World is a book that will change the way managers view the world and their businesses, and how they invent, commer cialize, and compete. It is the culmination of Ohmae's pioneering work on the increasing domi nance of consumers over companies and coun tries, and of the resultant melting away of national economic borders.

On a political map, the boundaries between coun tries are as clear as ever. But on a competitive map-one showing the real flows of financial and industrial activity-those boundaries have largely disappeared. The central fact of business today, according to Ohmae, is the emergence of consumer sovereignty. Performance standards for products are now set in the global marketplace by those who buy products, not those who make them or regulate them. That means that managers need to rethink how they develop and commer cialize new products. It means that companies must be truly global, decentralized, and, more than ever, focused on what consumers really need. Only then should managers adjust their plans to take into account what their competitors are doing. Ohmae does more than develop this argu ment: he provides, in detail and with vivid exam ples, insights into how companies can win in the new global marketplace as "insiders" in countries, not as exporters to them.

Ohmae has a message for governments as well: get out of the way. Don't try, through regulations or tariffs, to resist the new era in which every person in every developed country has an equal right to create and obtain and own the best products in the world.