BEE Partner, South Africa Economy Watch

Sun Tzu’s advice to make one’s position unassailable assumes critical proportions for an emerging nation like South Africa, faced with stiff global competition not only from the well-established and First World nations of the world, but also from other developing countries. The world’s more advanced and wealthy nations are deeply entrenched in the global system, and manipulate it for their own benefit. They virtually control it, and have often come under intense criticism for practising double standards, particularly in their application of such issues as, for example, international trade.’

Other emerging nations, as well as the poorer countries of the world, also want their slice of the global pie and their share of global resources. They too possess a desire to improve the standard of living of their citizens, thereby improving their position in the global (or at least their region’s) economic rankings. For any emerging nation to successfully play the globalisation game, there are a number of strategic principles, identified by Sun Tzu, that should be followed.

From a corporate perspective, strategy thinking today requires a paradigm shift. Business strategy tends to focus on acquiring market share, making more money and destroying the oppositio_n. Many vehicles are used to try to achieve this, such as mergers and acquisitions, retrenchments, productivity, and motivational and marketing strategies, amongst others. Many of these are desi_gned either to get the customer to buy more of one’s product, to buy one’s product over that of a competitor, or to lure away a custome_rfrom a competitor.

Whilst this is all good and well, many businesses have becom_e so obsessed with profitability that they have lost their way in society. Indeed, business has a moral obligation to contribute towards the welfare of society, because both form part of the greater social and economic environment. If this environment is damaged, business also suffers, as business organisations have to function in a wider environment. Today; some multinational corporations are economically more powerful than many countries. In the past few hundred years, the power in the world appears to have shifted from monarchs to governments to business corporations. And business corporations stand a very good chance of becoming power brokers, as more and more governments fail their electorate. We have started to see services previously under the control of governments, such as prison services, being privatised. Business also funds political parties. We may therefore hypothesise that the moves to privatise certain elements of nation-states as seen over recent years are going to signal a restructuring of the current political paradigm as we know it — certainly in the West. In this scenario, it can be argued that the role of business and business organisations in society is changing, and therefore strategy has to change with it. But is strategy enough to cope with such a change? Or do the rules of strategy remain the same and only their application is dynamic? And does this line of reasoning apply to the globalised environment?

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