ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors describe and provide data that highlight just how pervasive and interconnected globalization is today and speculate on trends for the future. Even though you could argue that globalization in one form or another has been rolling forward for centuries, over that period it was an exception that concerned only a tiny minority of companies and their leaders. Specifically, as international sales increase from zero to about 15 percent of total revenues, there is very little increase in how salient executives see global customers, competitors, suppliers, employees, and so on; executives’ focus on global issues remains low. For many firms around the world, several factors help explain the increase in exports in the 1970s and their acceleration in the 1990s. Although exports accounted for a majority of the increase in international sales from the 1960s through to about 1990 for US firms, the subsequent surge in international sales was driven more by foreign sales than exports.
