I believe that globalization is a term familiar to pretty much everyone; yet, the way people understand globalization may be quite different. On one hand, many believe that globalization is making the world smaller in a sense that local differences are replaced by global similarities. Indeed, it takes one just to travel around a bit…

If you look at the characteristics of brands admired by consumers and considered well-managed today, we see that they follow a pattern. Brands from the 21st Century are soft, while the successful brands from the last century were hard. It is worth noting that in many cases the brands are not new, but their managers have known how to…

One thing that struck me in Nairobi was the income gap. Neither picture is truthful. The same misconception can come from looking at country-level economic statistics unwisely. "Consumer income is one of the most important economic factors creating distance between countries," according to my colleague Ghemawat. Simple as this may seem, it gets complicated when…

Finally, "La Liga", the top professional soccer league in Spain, joined the rest of leagues in Europe (and America) in selling media rights collectively rather than on a team-by-team basis. This approach has the advantage of creating a monopoly where any interested buyer only has to negotiate with one entity, as opposed to 20 different…