EGS Global Business Blog

With over US$1 Trillion in assets at the end of 2007, ETFs have become a major global investment tool.

Tom Lydon, the US-based Global Guru of ETFs, defines them as “a basket of securities that represents a specific sector, region or specific index. ETFs are like a mutual fund, yet trade throughout the day like a stock. They are priced and traded continually throughout the day, and provide transparency, liquidity, and cost efficiency.”

Tom, who is a regular on CNBC, MarketWatch and Bloomberg, sees ETFs becoming the way for investors - business people - to measure growth around the world. He also shows on his website how “Global markets will no longer be in sync with the U.S. market.” Hence, he believes monitoring ETFs is the way to know where the world’s economy is going.

Regular readers of this blog and companies we help go global will know that we are always seeking new tools to rank countries as places to do business. Country ETFs provide, we believe, a window on how well the local economy is doing. A growing economy - with appreciating stock indiex ETF - could be a place for foreign companies to invest.

In his 2007 Year End Report, Tom Lydon makes 10 ETF predictions that should be read and understood by all business people doing global business. Check out Tom’s predictions at the link on the right side of this page.

According to Dr. Alan Rudi, “Success in business depends upon your ability to understand the “big picture”, referring of course, to the long term macro trends and changes that determine the future business environment.”

We often get mired in the everyday micro trends and do not realize the impact on our lives and businesses that major, global trends can have.

Dr. Rudi, who has had a successful career as both a senior corporate executive and as the Executive Vice President of a major university, sees 12 major trends that we as global business people should be aware of and should monitor for their potential impact on our ability to run profitable companies.

These macro trends range from technology (change may be faster in the future than in the recent past) to demographics (the Boomer generation aging impacts us all) to the economy (capitalism is still the only system that actually improves lives).

To learn more about these and Dr. Rudi’s other macro trends, please go to the link on the right side of this page.

You may not have heard of Robert O. Anderson, who died last week at 90 years of age. But if you have lived in the US since the late 1960s your life was changed by a risk this man took in the mid 1960s on a remote stretch of beach on the north coast of Alaska.

At the time, Mr. Anderson was head of the Atlantic Richfield oil company and his Alaska Manager, Mo Benson and Geologist, Harry Jameson, had drilled a very, very expensive dry hole (no commercial oil) far from civilization and conventional wisdom said abandon this immensely risky cause.

Robert O. - as we knew him - trusted his people and gave Mo and Harry another chance to drill one more hole. As a result, the largest oil field in the US - Prudhoe Bay - was found. Billions of barrels of oil have flowed from Alaska to the Lower 48 States since the 1970s, helping replace foreign oil and making the US a safer place.

Another result was that Atlantic Richfield, known in the industry as ARCO, went from a small regional oil company to become the 8th largest oil company in the US, the first US company to drill for oil in China and a real innovator on a global basis.

About the same time as Robert O. gave Mo and Harry that second chance at Prudhoe, I was finishing my Geology/Geophysics degree at St. Louis University and looking for a job in the oil business. In 1969, I accepted an entry job with Sinclair Oil, which was then bought by ARCO. During my 18 year career with ARCO, I was privileged to work for Harry Jameson and to work for the company in Iran, Indonesia, China, Alaska (twice) and Turkey.

My Wife, Nancy, and I adopted our Daughter, Heather, while we lived in Jakarta, Indonesia and I explored for ARCO in the Java Sea. Three years later Nancy gave birth to Amy while we lived the second time in Anchorage, Alaska as I managed ARCO’s geophysical exploration on the North Slope and offshore in the Beaufort Sea. And then I got the chance to help in the exploration in Zhanjiang, China arriving on Thanksgiving Day in 1982.

In the mid 1980s, we moved to Ankara, Turkey where I was honored to work with an exceptional team of people for ARCO. Our close relationship with Turkey and its people remains strong today.

Robert O. Anderson’s calculated risk taking and his immense faith in the people who worked for him positively changed the lives of our family and that of thousands of others families around the world. Thank you, Sir!

Read more about this Giant of industry - who understood his most important corporate asset was his employees - at the link on the right side of this page.

Dr. Pankaj Ghemawat, who teaches at the Harvard Business School, has written a new book on global strategy that uses many case histories and lots of data to make the case for the right way for businesses to Go Global.

Despite almost 5,000 books on globalization over the past 5 years (!?!), Dr. Ghemawat says globalization is really only at about 10% of what it could be.

He suggests that ’semiglobalization’ is best and proceeds to document many cases where major companies have gone global the most expensive way possible with very mixed results.

A regional strategy is perhaps the best strategy because, “nobody has figured out the optimal way to orgnaize a complex global economy”, according to Dr. Ghemawat.

The case histories alone make this a good book to read and learn from. A link to Amazon is given on the right side of this page.