Globalization and Risk

One goal of a multinational organization is to build, protect and exploit its unique resources to establish a competitive advantage. A similarly important goal of a multinational organization is to diversify the organization's financial risk portfolio. Discuss how globalization allows organizations to diversify their financial/business risks and amortize their fixed costs and resource investments throughout the organization.

Political and Legal Differences

Evaluate how differences in political and legal systems create vast misunderstandings and tremendous opportunities in the international marketplace; then propose how an organization can overcome these misunderstandings and take advantage of these opportunities.

Enhancing Competitiveness

Describe how globalization can lead to the integration of strategic demands for worldwide efficiency, local market responsiveness, and the spread of world-class technology across all national markets. How can these factors enhance competitiveness throughout the global marketplace?

Transforming Thinking

Global strategy making involves a major shift in focus from analytic, reactive and past-focused thinking to creative, proactive and future-oriented thinking. Identify a current global strategy that is reactive and past-focused and then reconstruct that strategy to one that is creative, proactive and future-oriented. Your post should illustrate how an organization can transform its thinking from reactive and past-focused to one that is proactive and future-oriented.

Factors Affecting Operations

There are a number of factors that affect the expansion of a multinational firm, including macroeconomic, political, regulatory, cultural, and social. Choose one multinational organization and determine how the factors are similar, and dissimilar, between their host country and one other country in which they operate. Discuss how these factors would affect the management of their operations in a foreign country.

Structure

Organizations are structured to take advantage of their inherent strengths and also to minimize their inherent weaknesses. For example, an organization may outsource its purchasing functions if they can be accomplished more effectively and efficiently by a private vendor. Evaluate how an organization is structured differently when it operates solely within one country versus one that operates in multiple countries. In particular, discuss the best fit of the multinational firm to its worldwide industry environment and the changing role of central headquarters as an organization expands into other countries.

Outsourcing

The conventional wisdom of monolithic expansion, ownership of all strategic resources, and carefully controlled market entry appears outdated. However, it may not be advantageous to outsource every product or service produced in a country. Detail and elaborate on the criteria or factors an organization should consider prior to outsourcing aspects of the product or service they produce.

Globally Right Source

Pressures to provide improved products at lower costs are an important factor prompting offshore outsourcing. Explain the concept of "globally right source" and detail how a firm can "globally right source" their value-adding activities to maximize their global competitive position.