In the New World Disorder, Loads of Rivals for America

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It's much the same in Latin America, where Mexico's CEMEX, with nearly $21.7 billion in revenue last year, is one of the largest cement producers in the world. Brazil's Embraer is the leading manufacturer of regional jets in the world.

And in Russia and Eastern Europe, Gazprom, based in Moscow, is the world's largest natural-gas company, providing 25% of Europe's natural gas. Another major player in Europe is Turkey's Vestel Electronics, the largest supplier of televisions on the continent.

These are some of the more prominent success stories: companies from everywhere competing with us for everything. Hundreds of other challengers that are relatively unknown today are ready to join them.

To meet this challenge, the U.S., or any other country that wants to remain in the game, can't afford to repeat past mistakes. And the worst mistake of all is complacency--to dismiss the challengers as a nuisance, as the U.S. did Japan in the 1960s, rather than view them as serious competition. You can see the results of complacency when you look at the Big Three U.S. automakers.

In the new world of globality, the new rule is that there are no rules. Just because U.S. companies have always done something a certain way doesn't mean they should continue to do so. Companies need to be fast and flexible and understand their markets and customers as never before.

The road going forward is like an eight-lane highway with no access and egress signs, no directions, no lane markings, no speed limits, no police and no one knowing if they should drive on the left side or the right side of the road. You make your own rules and do your best to get to your destination. In the world of globality, you can't wait for someone else to set the rules.

I like to tell the story of a Chinese manufacturer that was getting feedback about its washing machines' clogging up drains. The company investigated and found that the machines worked just fine but that rural consumers were using them to wash potatoes. What would an American company do to solve this problem? Call in a p.r. firm to tell consumers that washing vegetables voids their warranty? The Chinese company had a better idea: it added a vegetable-wash cycle to its machines. We call this innovating with ingenuity--and no government program can teach this.

Global competitiveness in the era of globality--where the new rules are no rules--requires new ways, new thinking. This is a battle that any nation dares not lose.

Sirkin is a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group and a co-author of a new book, Globality: Competing with Everyone from Everywhere for Everything

World Economic Forum Who's Got the Edge

Each year the World Economic Forum handicaps 130 countries in the global-competitiveness race. Here are the top 50 [This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine or PDF.]