Anil Gupta

Global Megatrends and Game Changers: Business leaders must gain insight-advantage by grasping the global mega-trends and game changers of the next decade.

In the early 1990s, China was a relatively small economy which had just built its very first highway. Mobile phones were a luxury purchased mainly by rich Europeans. And, social media meant walking over to your neighbor to borrow his/her newspaper. How the world has changed over the last twenty years.

Notwithstanding how much change we have witnessed in recent years, it’s a certainty that the quantum of change over the next ten years will be even greater than over the last twenty. By 2025, emerging economies like China and India will grow from 1/3 of the global GDP to about half. China will have caught up to the U.S. in terms of economy, and India, will be the third largest in the world. This growth will not be even, nor evenly distributed.

In this talk, Professor Gupta will discuss the six megatrends that will drive this transformation:

• Restructuring of the global economy;
• Growing volatility and risks;
• Divergent demographics;
• Emergence of paradigm-shifting technologies;
• Resource and environmental crunch;
• The rise of the empowered individual

The collective impact of these global game changers will be such that the structure and dynamics of the world’s economy, politics, and culture in 2025 will be fundamentally different from what they are today. Professor Gupta will also discuss what these megatrends mean for countries, companies, investors and individuals in terms of who can expect to thrive in the new era.

Emerging Markets: Diverging Futures

Ever since Goldman Sachs’ prescient report “Dreaming with BRICs” over a decade ago, emerging markets have been on a ride.

From 2000 to 2012, emerging markets’ GDP grew at an average annual rate of 6 percent, over three times the pace of the below 2 percent annual growth for the developed markets. As a direct result, emerging markets’ share of the global economy doubled from 17 percent in 2000 to 32 percent in 2012. Never before in the history of the world, has 80 percent of the world’s population become better off at the pace that it has since the turn of the 21st century.

Notwithstanding this glorious ride, it is clear that, since early 2013, the bloom has fallen off the emerging markets. China is undergoing a structural slowdown from an above 10 percent growth rate to around 6-7 percent. India has gone from 9 percent to around 5 percent. Economic growth in Brazil and Russia is hovering around one percent. Many other markets such as Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey and South Africa also appear to be mired in significant turmoil. These developments raise one of the most important questions facing every enterprise and every investor – is the emerging market story over?

In this talk, Professor Gupta addresses this question head on. His central message is that the days of emerging markets moving up in tandem are indeed over. China is unlikely to remain the driver of a worldwide commodity boom. Similarly, the U.S. is unlikely to remain the font of easy money for much of the world. From here on, only those emerging markets that are able to undertake much needed internal reforms (stable governments, investment in infrastructure and education, and institutions that are efficient as well as responsive to citizens’ needs) can hope to thrive. Others run a serious risk of being trapped at their current low- or middle-income status for a very long time. Professor Gupta will also share his analysis of which countries appear to be better bets than others and what these developments mean for companies and investors.

Global Enterprise 2020: The structure and dynamics of the global economy are changing rapidly

Despite the ups and downs in individual economies, emerging markets as a group continue to grow at three times the pace of developed markets; by 2025, they will account for over half of the world’s GDP. The diffusion of mobile broadband to every corner of the earth continues to make cross-border collaboration easier, cheaper, and more ubiquitous. And, the technology revolution continues unabated – electric and/or autonomous cars, wearable computing, genetic engineering, shale oil and gas, human-scale robots, etc. These developments will lead to the disruption of industries at an even faster pace than what we’ve seen over the last decade.

Given these developments, what must today’s corporations do to emerge or remain as the global leaders in their industries ten years from now? The answer lies in:

• (i) rethinking global strategy i.e., commitment to emerging markets, atomization of the value chain, and leveraging global platforms to create highly customized local solutions;
• (ii) rethinking global innovation i.e., 360-degree innovation, distributed innovation, open innovation, and frugal innovation;
• (iii) rethinking global organization i.e., connect-and-coordinate rather than command-and-control plus a strong one-company culture; and
• (iv) globalizing the corporate mindset i.e., cultivating leaders who combine in-depth knowledge of key markets and cultures with an ability to connect the dots globally.