Bumpy new world

摘要

In the boom years of globalisation from 1990, one of the ideas that became gospel, spread by authors such as Thomas Friedman, was that the world had become flat. National boundaries mattered very little in terms of sourcing and manufacturing, went the argument. The idea was so pervasive, says Hau Lee of Stanford University, that "companies just built anywhere". Now, as the outlook for globalisation grows cloudy, companies are starting to question the wisdom of the hyper-globalised supply chains thus created. Mr Lee reckons that managers at mncs must now build new skills as they reconfigure supply chains for a "bumpy" new world.