World Trade - October 2008 - (Page 39)

SMALL AND MEDIUM-SCALE ENTERPRISE Everybody is Global Regardless of size, few U.S. companies are not engaged in world trade. Woe be to ‘little guys’ who don’t yet know it! BY MARK BERNSTEIN F ive years back, Joe Zawacki noted the Asian points of production on the gifts being unwrapped that Christmas. Zawacki lived near Tacoma, a West Coast port deep in the land of Internet startups. He considered the circumstance and decided: why not me? With a partner, Zawacki launched a garage-based gift item importing business on eBay; then relocated to a storage unit. Drawing on resources available through the Port of Tacoma and World Trade Center/Tacoma for advice, Zawacki traveled to China. Today, he is in charge of a million-dollar import business. This turn of events was surprising to Zawacki. Becoming an importer, he said, “wasn’t even on the radar. I never would have believed that I would hop on a plane and go to China.” Surprising as it may have been to Zawacki, his story is a common one in this age of a globalized economy: ‘Have entrepreneurship, will travel.’ Indeed, in The Globalization of the Small Enterprise, Jeffrey Graham argues that while major corporations carried the freight early in economic globalization, the future belongs to the small: “the globalization of the small enterprise will most likely be the most important development in international business as we begin the new millennium.” With globalization the strongest tide in the world economy, one tends to hear reports of those who, like Tacoma’s Zawacki, have chosen to go with the ﬂow. But conversations around different sectors reveal a different, somewhat submerged truth—the number of ﬁrms that have their eyes ﬁxed not, say, on the Paciﬁc Rim, but on familiar markets close to home. Rather than go with the ﬂow, these smaller ﬁrms see globalization as a ‘big boy’ game being played by the Fortune 500, but one in which they are themselves safe to remain on the sidelines, doing things more or less the way they always have. Rather than consider themselves ‘global’ players, they define themselves as entirely domestic. But are they right? Is ‘opting out’ of the global market an option anymore for anyone, regardless of size or sector? What has changed? Technology breakthroughs undergird today’s global market and have made it ubiquitous. At one time, a company that wished to engage in international trade needed a trained teletype operator on its WWW.WORLDTRADEMAG.COM 39 http://WWW.WORLDTRADEMAG.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of World Trade - October 2008

World Trade - October 2008 Contents Tune Up Your Supply Chain Globalization: The Real Competitive Threat Supply Chain Watch Tradewinds Shippers and Providers Collaborate to Take on a Challenging Economy Tweaking the Supply Chain to Optimize Value and Minimize Cost Supply Chain Software Morphs Into Enterprise Management Can Warehousing Really, Truly Be Strategic? Everybody is Global Between the Devil and the Deep The Hidden Costs of ‘Free’ Translation Blowing Smoke

World Trade - October 2008

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