The global business you study
What "global context" means
- A business in a global context is one operating in an international environment.
- In practice that usually means a New Zealand-registered business trading beyond New Zealand.
- That is a wider door than it sounds. A business qualifies if it does any of these:
- exports a good or service to offshore customers
- imports materials, components or finished stock
- operates sites, staff or subsidiaries overseas
- sells to international visitors in New Zealand, or competes here against imported products
Knowing one global business in depth
- Internal factors only make sense attached to a real business, so you need one you know properly. For that business, know:
- what it makes or does, and which markets it sells into
- how it manages quality, and what system it uses
- one innovation it has made, and roughly when
- one change it has been through, and how management handled it
- one thing it owns and protects — a brand, a recipe, a process, a design
- one strategic response it has made to something outside its control
- Two named specifics beat five vague ones. A named market, system or year shows real knowledge of the business; general praise could have been written from its home page.
- Compare:
- Weak: "Fonterra is a big New Zealand dairy exporter."
- Useful: "Fonterra exports dairy products to more than 100 markets, so a quality failure in one production run can be held at a port on the other side of the world, weeks after it was made and long after the batch could be traced back to a shift."
The four key concepts
- Four key concepts sit under the whole subject: enterprise, globalisation, citizenship and sustainability.
- They are not topics in their own right, but they sit underneath every internal factor:
- enterprise — spotting an opportunity and taking a risk on it
- globalisation — the interconnection of markets, so an event in one country moves a business in another
- citizenship — the business as a member of a community with obligations to it
- sustainability — the ongoing focus on economic, social, cultural and environmental outcomes together
- Sustainability at Level 3 has four legs, not one. When a question says "sustainability", check which one it means. Economic sustainability is about the business surviving financially; environmental sustainability is about its effect on the natural world; social and cultural sustainability are about its effect on people and their values.