Real globalisation hurts

You know that mattress commercial where the guy places a goblet of red wine on one corner of the mattress, jumps up and down on the other corner…and the wine doesn’t spill? Then he does the same with a competitor’s mattress and makes a mess?

Yesterday Taiwan proved that the world is no longer a Tempur-pedic mattress. Disrupt one side, and you get spills all over the place.

(and for the record, I never could figure out how that wine trick proved I was going to get a good night’s sleep on a Tempur-pedic mattress, but never mind)

A 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit Taiwan yesterday, an event that would normally rate a “Too bad. What’s for dinner?” from most of the US. If the disaster was, say, tsunami-sized, we might go so far as to send (or personally donate) humanitarian aid. And we’d feel really, really sad about the whole thing.

But hey–it’s not like it really hurt us, right?

Wrong. The Taiwan quake is hitting the world in the pocketbook because–surprise–globalisation is real. Bloomberg and the BBC report that the Taiwan quake knocked out some significant telecomm cables, and the resulting outages will kill phone and Internet service to a significant chunk of Asia for days if not weeks.

Thanks to globalisation and offshoring, that’s not just an Asian problem anymore. Companies all over the world are being hit hard by this. Call centers are down. Development projects are delayed. Supply chains are disrupted. Sales meetings aren’t happening.

I suspect that this, and a few more disasters like it, are going to make significant inroads into the notions of sovereignty, borders, and that an all-seeing US-based manager can control what’s going on halfway ’round the world. The Internet is erasing all that, and the growing pains–like figuring out what you do when your Malaysian call center can’t take calls–aren’t going to be fun.

I worked for a large, global company for several years, one that prided itself on its globalisation capabilities…and even with all the money they poured into making it work–it mostly didn’t work. You can’t simply transport old F2F business practices into cyberspace and expect success. You can’t offshore critical pieces of the company and expect things to behave the way they did when Joe and his team were down the hall…but that’s what they did.

I’m not preaching isolationism here, quite the contrary–for the US to succeed we must fully and actively partner with the rest of the world. But US businesses need to wake up and smell the globalisation. Our infrastructure depends on taking care of neighbors near and far and treating them as partners, not puppies in need of a bit more training. But all too often, that’s still what I’m seeing.

Hmmm. Will the first truly international government be created to manage the world’s communications infrastructure? And will it draw from the US government…or US business?

Gonna be a fascinating decade.

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