IxDG Resource Library
IxDG has launched its Resource Library, “an annotated collection of content on all aspects of interaction design.”
Archive | May, 2005
The Future Belongs to China
MSNBC has an illuminating feature on China’s growing power. A must-read to understand where commerce, politics, and culture are heading over the next decade or so.
[...] tariffs and walls are not the way to prosper in the emerging global economy. It’s not just China but India, Brazil, South Africa and Thailand, among others, that are all entering the global market with sophistication and skill. The answer for Western countries cannot be to shut themselves off from this new reality. After all, they benefit from the expansion of global commerce. The European Union’s exports to China have risen 600 percent in the past 15 years. More broadly, countries that have tried to wall themselves off from the rest of the world in the past—to maintain their economy or culture—have stagnated. Those that have embraced change have flourished. China is simply the biggest part of a new world. You cannot switch it off.
How these scenarios play out will depend greatly on how effectively we’re able to communicate across cultural divides. One thing’s clear to me: I’m signing up for Chinese lessons.
Hispanic Web Marketing
Website Marketing: “One of the most valuable lessons that I learned was that in order to acquire and retain these valuable customers, you need to present them with culturally relevant information in their own language. It was not enough to translate materials that were designed with the needs and interests of the general market in mind.”
Stealth expats
The Economist: “[Renault’s Carlos Ghosn and GlaxoSmithKline’s Jean-Pierre Garnier] are the most visible examples of a growing army of mobile workers who are giving human resources (HR) departments a new sort of headache: how to track where they are and when, for tax and visa purposes.”
Two perspectives:
- Makes me wonder how the work I do can best support the needs of this new type of professional, considering these are the top-level managers of some of the world’s major corporations.
- It’s not just CxOs
- highly specialized professionals (say, IAs focussed on globalization issues ;) ) can easily end up in the stealth expat category. How do we, who don’t have the backing of large HR/legal departments, deal with the legal/fiscal complexities that result from working in various countries?
