Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The frontier of business growth is shifting from the giants to small and medium-sized enterprises. This book shows how these new pioneers can collaborate, innovate and export. It aims to show why emerging companies in new technology fields have to be born global just to keep their domestic business, why it is important to act quickly, and how many apparent problems (such as outside ownership of local companies) can be turned to advantage. The book also looks at the development of local communities - cities, boroughs and towns everywhere are developing their own strategic plans and foreign policies - and shows the three ways communities can succeed, explaining how to apply the lessons outlined.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Kanter (Men & Women of the Corporation, Basic Bks., 1993) is a prolific writer in the areas of organization, change, and work and family. Expanding her view to encompass the globalization not only of business but of our daily lives, she strives to convey the importance of realizing the worldwide impact of our decisions as individuals, corporations, and communities. Kanter discusses the fundamental and far-reaching elements of change in the workplace: outsourcing, temporary workers, and job loss. In the chapter "Making the Global Economy Work Locally," which examines studies of foreign companies operating successfully in Boston, South Carolina, and Miami, she asserts, "The best cities are places where businesses and people learn better and develop faster than they otherwise would, because they are centers of the three C's...concepts, competence, and connections." A solid work; recommended for all business collections.‘Lisa K. Miller, Paradise Valley Community Coll. Lib., Phoenix (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

How to survive and grow in a globalized world is a popular question asked by individuals, business professionals, policy makers, and community leaders. Kanter argues that the viewpoint of the localist, or the inward looking attitude, is no longer sustainable in a globalized world. According to her, we are moving towards a society where business winners will be "world class," comprising cosmopolitans who transcend the local boundary and meet highest standards worldwide. The world class, she writes, is rich in three intangible assets: concepts (the best and latest knowledge and ideas); competence (the ability to operate at the highest standards in any locale); and connections (the best relationships, which provide access to the resources of other people and organizations around the world). To be successful, the business sector and communities must join together. In particular businesses must get involved in building communities where they can feel at home, and community leaders must develop a world-class attitude. Kanter offers a detailed agenda for business and community leaders to achieve these mutually beneficial goals. Kanter's book is prescriptive, the outcome of research carried out in Seattle, Miami, Cleveland, Boston, and Spartanburg-Greenville. The book is directed toward corporate and community leaders, advising them of the forces of globalization and how to successfully adapt to a changing world. Her ideas are thought provoking and her suggestions valuable. Academic and public library collections. A. N. M. Waheeduzzaman; University of New Haven

Booklist Review

Count on many requests for Kanter's latest contribution to the world of business. Based on extensive questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups, her new book examines what factors equate with her definition of the word cosmopolitan. She heralds five cities, from Boston to Seattle, as urban areas thriving in world markets, yet she scrutinizes each for warts as well as wisdom. Her principles seem sound; for instance, she encourages companies to organize around customers, to collaborate with partners, to set high goals, and to support constant learning. Her depth of research makes it difficult to refute her contention that strong collaborations and strong infrastructures present the new keys to global survival and to success. --Barbara Jacobs

Kirkus Book Review

An academic's generic advisories on what, with awesome self- assurance but no particularly fresh insights, she asserts it will take commercial enterprises and their host communities to prosper in the Global Village's increasingly interdependent economy. Noting that advances in communications, distribution, and transportation have effectively shrunk the world of business, Kanter (When Giants Learn to Dance, 1989, etc.) offers lucid if unsurprising commentary on the ways in which the global economy's imperatives now affect US industry at all levels. Withal, her digressive, anecdotal text represents as much an effort to encourage corporate and municipal America to embrace geopolitical change as an attempt to construe events in what she dubs ``the global shopping mall.'' In aid of this agenda, the author extols the potential rewards of cross-border alliances that afford access to distant markets while warning of the workplace and related risks incurred by cosmopolitan concerns that lose touch with their roots. With time out to deprecate economic nationalism, Kanter goes on to cite a number of multinationals great and small as exemplars of global competitiveness. Cases in point range from Colgate- Palmolive, Gillette, and Hewlett-Packard through Tech Ridge (a sometime machine shop that has made the most of its status as a Polaroid supplier). The author also sets great store by location, in particular urban areas that embody her touchstone ``three C'sthe key global assets of concepts, competence, and connections.'' As paradigmatic territory, she singles out Boston (a hub of knowledge-based industries), Greenville and Spartanburg, S.C. (hometowns of uncommonly skilled production workers), and Miami (a commercial/cultural crossroads). At the close, Kanter provides a series of recommendations that could give cities and resident corporations a so-called collaborative advantage in capitalizing on the global marketplace's many opportunities. Coherent if run-of-the-mill counsel from a don who could learn a thing or two from the sophisticated perspectives in Kenichi Ohmae's The End of the Nation State (p. 691). (First serial to Harvard Business Review; author tour)

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Rosabeth Moss Kanter (born 1943) is a tenured professor in business at Harvard Business School, where she holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship. In the 2007-2008 Academic school year, she taught a course to MBA students entitled Managing Change.

A 1967 Ph.D graduate of the University of Michigan, she has written numerous books on business management techniques, particularly change management. She also has a regular column in the Miami Herald. She was #11 in a 2000s survey of Top 50 Business Intellectuals by citation in several sources.

(Bowker Author Biography)