Is Tipping Obligatory in America?

Below is an article by Max Fisher for The Atlantic which covers in part, as he says, the surprising frankness in discussing the warts of American history and society.

The United States is the second greatest tourist draw in the world, with 60-million-plus visitors in 2010 alone (France, number one, attracted almost 80 million). Flipping through a few of the many English-language tourist guides provides a fascinating, if non-scientific and narrow, window into how people from the outside world perceive America, Americans, and the surprises and pitfalls of spending time here. 

The comments are telling and really crack me up.

Read the entire article:  Welcome America, Please Be On Time:  What Guide Books Tell Foreign Visitors to the U.S.

Green Standards For An Ever Changing Complex World

Walmart’s Chinese sales receipts account for only 2 percent of the company’s annual revenues or roughly $7.5 billion. Fortunately, its sales in China have risen substantially over the past decade. Not the case in the United States; they have been shrinking.

What does this mean? Is China changing Walmart or is Walmart changing China?  Looks like new green initiatives are in the works.

The world’s biggest corporation and the world’s most populous nation have launched a bold experiment in consumer behavior and environmental stewardship: to set green standards for 20,000 suppliers making several hundred thousand items sold to billions of shoppers worldwide. Will that effort take hold, or will it unravel in a recriminatory tangle of misguided expectations and broken promises?

Read the entire article here.

Is Walmart Really Changing China?

Or is it the other way around?  Walmart wants to set green standards for 20,000 suppliers making several hundred thousand items sold to billions of shoppers worldwide. The question becomes:  Will that effort take hold, or will it unravel?

Although Walmart’s $7.5 billion in Chinese sales receipts account for only 2 percent of the company’s annual revenues, its sales in China have risen substantially over the past decade.  Sales in the United States, by contrast, have been shrinking.  And as China’s retail market—the world’s fastest-growing—expands by 18 percent a year, Walmart’s executives smell the intoxicating scent of more growth to come.  Equally important, if not more so, some 20,000 Chinese suppliers, or “partners,” reportedly provide Walmart with about 70 percent of the nearly $420 billion worth of goods that it sells globally each year.

Take a look here.

Illustration credit:  Walmart in China map

As It Relates to Global Business, What Is a Triple Bottom Line?

This commentary is really about:  is it harder to run a business in China than America? That should draw your interest! But take a good look at how contributor Liam Casey, founder and CEO of PCH International, covers what a "triple bottom line" is and how it can help companies achieve a successful and sustainable global business model.

Read the entire piece here.

Posted by:  The Global Small Business Blog

Business Megastars: The New Global Elite

Around the world, are the super-rich different from you or me?

Excerpt from the author, Chrystia Freeland:

Through my work as a business journalist, I’ve spent the better part of the past decade shadowing the new super-rich: attending the same exclusive conferences in Europe; conducting interviews over cappuccinos on Martha’s Vineyard or in Silicon Valley meeting rooms; observing high-powered dinner parties in Manhattan. Some of what I’ve learned is entirely predictable: the rich are, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously noted, different from you and me.

According to Freeland, a lot of the distinctions have to do with our light-speed, globally connected economy.

Learn more:

The Rise of the New Global Elite
by Chrystia Freeland
The Atlantic 

Posted by:  The Global Small Business Blog