I recommend that this book be read AFTER reading C.K. Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks) (a book that I earnestly hope wins the author the Nobel Peace Prize), and Stuart Hart's Capitalism at the Crossroads: Aligning Business, Earth, and Humanity (2nd Edition) (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks) Whereas those two books are essential background and strategically transformative, showing the four trillion in potential revenue from four billion people whose individual disposable income averages $10 a year, this book is more operational, a handbook for global profit.
The section on reinventing economics is a very useful preamble to the remainder of the book, where the author dissects both governments and business practices before going on to discuss platforms for progress inclusive of technologies and languages.
The last third of the book provides the “script” for future global prosperity. The most valuable and actionable pages are from 255-268, where the author concisely identifies the following areas as potential break-out zones for enormous profit: Hainan Island, Petropavlosk-Kamchatsily in Russia, Vancouver and British Columbia, the Baltic Corner, Ho Chi Minh City, Khabarovsk, Maritime (Primorye) Province and Sakhalin Island in Russia, Sau Paulo, and Kyushu in Japan. If I were a major multinational interested in doubling my gross and profit in the next ten years, I would immediately commission a single General Manager for each of these areas, and send them to build an indigenous networked business from scratch in each of these areas.
The author, who I am reminded wrote “The Mind of the Strategist” as a young man in the 1970's, has an extraordinay intellect that has been very ably applied to a most important topic: creating stabilizing wealth.
Wharton School Publishing has impressed me greatly with these three books. I have toyed with earning a third graduate degree in either environmental economics or Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) business management, and while I will probably not do so, what these three books make clear to me is that Wharton is a happening place and clearly making a difference. Good stuff!
