I (this is your co-author Mary “speaking” here). Love. Cashews. Chocolate-covered cashews, honey-roasted cashews, plain cashews, salted cashews, you name it. Little did I realize when I purchased a bag (or a dozen bags!) to enjoy, the vast array of complex global forces behind the cashew industry that brought those bags of yumminess to my doorstep in an Amazon Prime box delivered by my local UPS delivery driver. It’s a fascinating story that shows how industries (and businesses) change as a result of globalization.3 (It’s highly likely that products that you love and use have a global “story” as well!) An important issue that managers must deal with is globalization. For years, India was the cashew capital of the world. Thousands of Indians (primarily women) were employed in the highly labor-intensive industry. Protecting those workers was important, so the Indian government enacted specific labor laws and regulations to do that. By the 1990s, India was the king of cashews as it accounted for a solid 80 percent of the global cashew market. However, almost 2,000 miles away, Vietnamese cashew processors were investing in automated equipment and becoming much more efficient than those labor-intensive Indian processors, thus creating a significant competitive threat to India’s market domination. Those laws intended to protect the Indian workers most likely ended up harming them as cashew processing switched to the more efficient Vietnamese businesses. That’s not the end of the story, however. Even in something as seemingly simple as cashew processing, the forces and impacts of globalization don’t and won’t stay the same. Although Vietnam may have the upper hand now, much of the cashew processing appears to be shifting to countries in Africa. And that’s the reality—and challenge—of today’s global environment where your product, your competition, and even your workforce can be found anywhere and at any time.

Recalling our discussion in Chapter 2 that identified global forces as one component of the external environment, we know that managers of organizations doing business globally face challenges such as changing laws and regulations, catastrophic natural disasters that immediately can disrupt time-sensitive supply chains, global economic meltdowns, continually changing domestic and global competitors, heated political discussions over topics such as immigration and protectionism, and even potential terrorist threats. Despite such challenges, we reemphasize our debunked myth that globalization isn’t about to disappear. Nations and businesses have been trading with each other for centuries through all kinds of disasters, wars, and economic/political/cultural ups and downs. Over the last couple of decades, we’ve seen an explosion of companies—big and small—operating almost anywhere in the world. Geographic borders mean little when it comes to doing business. For instance, BMW, a German firm, builds cars in South Carolina. McDonald’s sells hamburgers in China. Tata, an Indian company, purchased the Jaguar brand—which started as a British company—from Ford Motor Company, a U.S. company. Even IBM, a pioneer of American high-tech innovation, now has more employees in India than in the United States.4

The world is still a global village—that is, a boundaryless world where goods and services are produced and marketed worldwide—but how managers do business in that global village is changing. To be effective in this boundaryless world, managers need to adapt to this changed environment, as well as to be more understanding of cultures, systems, and techniques that are different from their own.