How to reassess existing global strategies?

The first major question to ask is: how central are foreign markets to the future of our company? The vast majority of U.S. headquartered Fortune 500 companies still view foreign markets as an add-on supplement to the domestic U.S. market. Very few business leaders have internalized the fact that 75 percent of the world’s GDP is outside the and that emerging economies are growing three times faster than the U.S. economy. It may well be more prudent to view market opportunities outside the U.S. as even more central to the company’s future than those within the U.S. The second major question to ask is: what’s our company’s global market share and is it growing or declining? In a rapidly integrating global economy, for most large companies, global market share is as an increasingly crucial measure of market share. You may have a large market share in the U.S. but if your global market share is low or declining, it is a certainty that, at some point, an aggressive player from another corner of the world will mount an attack on you in your home market. The third major question to ask is: looking at the entire world as our playing field, how optimal is (a) our market presence, (b) the global architecture of our value chain, (c) our global R&D network, and (d) our capital base? Once we have identified the sub-optimalities, what should we do to fix them?