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Whether you’re talking domestic policy or foreign policy, the context for everything we do is global. I think we’ve got to approach that reality with a little humility. My father used to say, “Lee, you’re the head of a big, worldwide corporation. I’ll bet you’ve met a million people. Well, that leaves billions of people you haven’t met. So, keep an open mind. It’s a big universe out there.” My father didn’t live to see the incredible explosion of global interdependence that has occurred in the past twenty years, but I think his advice would have been the same.
My friend, former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who knows something about globalization because he’s one of the few people who has seen the whole globe from the moon, sent me this piece that he said was making the rounds on the Internet. It makes the point—vividly:
Question: What is the truest definition of Globalization?
Answer: Princess Diana’s death.
Question: How come?
Answer: An English princess with an Egyptian boyfriend crashes in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian who was drunk on Scotch whiskey, followed closely by Italian Paparazzi, on Japanese motorcycles, treated by an American doctor, using Brazilian medicines. This is posted by an American, using Bill Gates’ technology, and you’re probably reading this on a computer that uses Taiwanese chips and a Korean monitor, assembled by Bangladeshi workers in a Singapore plant, transported by Indian lorry-drivers, hijacked by Indonesians, unloaded by Sicilian longshoremen, and trucked to you by Mexican illegals. That, my friend, is Globalization!
I’m not trying to make light of Princess Diana’s death. But it kind of makes your head spin to consider how interconnected the world has become. Some people are nervous about globalization. And some people are just in denial. But it’s impossible to escape it—the way the world seeps in. You can’t fence the world out, and you can’t fence yourself in. Technology knows no borders. As one of the first computer geeks stated, “Information wants to be free.”
To fear globalization is to fear change, but like it or not, change is a constant in our lives.
Now I don’t know about you, but every time in my life I got secure and complacent, God threw me a curve. Looking back, I now see that it wasn’t a curve, it was a challenge. A challenge I needed. I had to shake off my complacency and change. Whenever you hear anyone saying, “Let’s keep doing things exactly the way we’ve been doing them for twenty years,” watch out. A shake-up is coming.
The seasons change. Summer follows spring, and night follows day. Life is full of ups and downs. Business cycles go round and round. Events happen that rock your world: People in the family die. You get a divorce. You get fired. Your business goes under. I’ve been through all of these changes, and each time I’ve had to wake up and try something different.
Before you can deal with change, however, you have to see it. Then you have to accept it. Sometimes that’s the hardest part—acknowledging and then accepting that the way you’ve always done business or lived your life just won’t work anymore.
This is just a basic life lesson. It’s true of individuals, families, and companies. And of course it’s true of nations. There are plenty of historical examples of nations that got knocked in the head because they resisted change. In fact, you can go back and track the success and failure of any nation in the world by how open it was to change.
Imperial Spain had tons of gold and silver in the 1600s, but its empire soon collapsed because it didn’t change with the times. The once-great British empire launched the industrial revolution and colonized the world. But it got dragged down by its bureaucracy and today has the lowest per capita income in Europe. The Soviet Union had more land, gold, and oil than anybody in the world. But its rigid Communist system strangled its ability to change with the times.
Japan, too, was reluctant to change. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the Japanese economy grew 10 percent a year. Some economists predicted that it would surpass the U.S. economy by the year 1998. That didn’t happen. Not even close. Why? Because Japan refused to open its doors to farming, retailing, and finance. The big bust in the 1990s came because Japan had created a bubble economy—basically, an illusion of profit—and had stopped facing reality. You can’t manipulate your currency decade after decade and not eventually face the consequences.
America hasn’t been immune. We paid a big price for getting too comfortable after World War II. We had a conquerer’s mentality, and as a result we didn’t think the competition from Japan meant much. We got a little arrogant—okay, a lot arrogant—and we started to slide.
These days everyone is looking toward China. But for hundreds of years China was the sleeping giant. It’s the oldest and most overpowering example of resistance to change.
Back in the Middle Ages, China was the preeminent nation on earth, and the most technologically advanced. Among its other contributions to civilization, it invented paper, the printing press, the compass, the telescope, and gunpowder. We in the West have benefited from the genius of China for thousands of years. But in the past, some of the really good ideas took a while to get out.
Take the wheelbarrow. The simple wheelbarrow, invented in China, took almost twelve hundred years to get to Europe. The blast furnace, used to make cast iron, took almost eighteen hundred years to get to the West. And something as simple as the common match was used in China for two thousand years before it reached the West. Since I’m of Italian heritage, the invention I’m most grateful for is noodles, which we now call pasta.
Today, you wouldn’t be able to keep good ideas like these secret for very long. The world is much smaller and more open. No matter how determined you are to keep it to yourself, it’s going to leak out through e-mails and phone calls and observation. It’s astounding to realize, however, that until President Nixon’s historic engagement with China in the early 1970s, we weren’t even talking, let alone sharing technology. Now we know that ideas and innovation cannot be walled in or walled out.
It’s instructive to consider how China became so isolated. During the fifteenth century, China suddenly turned inward due to a strong cultural conviction that its society was superior to all others. China closed its doors and refused to allow competing ideas in. Outsiders represented inferiority. Well, you know what happens when any society rests on its laurels. It grows complacent and lazy, and that’s what happened in China. The powerful emperors and bureaucracy stifled innovation. The result was five centuries of stagnation.
Meanwhile, Europe came out of the Middle Ages with a completely different outlook, and began the long march toward capitalism and democracy. It began colonizing the world. America came into being because of this expansive ideology.
But today—almost overnight, it seems—we are seeing the stirring of a phenomenal cultural shift in China. It happened in large part because a daring leader stepped forward and forced China to join the twentieth century.
His name was Deng Xiaoping. For many years, Deng was in Mao Tse-tung’s inner circle. But he was something of a rebel, and Mao exiled him to a tractor repair plant in a remote outpost where he was forced to become a mechanic to support himself. But he didn’t complain. He worked his way back into Mao’s good graces, and he went on to become one of the most influential leaders of the twentieth century.
After Mao’s death in 1976, Deng took over the leadership, and he tried to bring China into the modern age. Deng saw the advantages of developing China’s economy, and he tried to open up relations with the West. It was Deng who arranged a peaceful transfer of Hong Kong from British control, promising that Hong Kong would remain a capitalist nation. He introduced the idea of the “two Chinas”—one Communist, on the mainland, and one capitalist, in Hong Kong.
When I did business in China during the late eighties and early nineties, I experienced the strange schizophrenia of a nation trying to maintain Communism in a free market world. It didn’t work so well. I remember on one occasion I had sold a four-cylinder engine line to a village a thousand miles north of Beijing. (By village, I mean an area with a population of about one million people.) Everything was controlled by the local commissar—which would be comparable to having your city council member control your business decisions. When I arrived at the commissar’s office, he said, “Sorry. So sorry. I can’t see you today.”
I was flabbergasted. “I came all the way to China to help set up an assembly line!”
He shrugged. “My problem this morning is that I’m short of kindergarten teachers. Our business will have to wait.”
Can China maintain its Communist system in a free market economy? I don’t think so. Something will have to give. If you ask me, very soon there will be only one China, and it will be capitalist.
THE MARKET SPEAKS LOUD AND CLEAR
So let’s start with this premise: First, globalization is inescapable. And second, because globalization is inescapable, it’s good. That’s another way of saying that what we can’t prevent we must embrace.
I’m a business guy, so my instinct is to ask, How can we benefit from the growing markets of China and India? The population of China alone comprises one fifth of the world. Here in America we’ve tended to view that as an intimidating fact instead of a huge, lucrative market.
In the next ten years China’s demand for cars will grow at a rate that is almost unthinkable. It is estimated to reach eight to ten million new cars per year. Who is going to build those cars? Today, every major car company is trying to get a foothold in China.
India is also booming. I’ve never heard so much moaning and groaning about anything as I’ve heard about India. People are burned up about outsourcing. They get annoyed when they have to go through Indian customer service representatives to get help with their American products. But from the standpoint of infusing business with creativity and opportunity, it’s a great thing that India has taken this niche and run with it. What once was a nation identified with its teeming masses and abject poverty is emerging—somewhat chaotically, but legitimately—as a partner in progress. We can welcome it, or we can shut it out. Our call.
The Las Vegas developer Steve Wynn is a good example of what it means to welcome globalization. Recently I had dinner with Steve and his wife in Las Vegas. Steve was telling me about his new resort in Macau, which is near Hong Kong. He said that since he’s doing business in China, he’s learning to speak mandarin Chinese. Like everything with Steve, he’s totally immersing himself in the effort. He’s got a full-time mandarin teacher who travels with him everywhere he goes. That’s global thinking at its best.
“MR. BUSH, TEAR DOWN THAT WALL!”
The first time I visited China, in 1989, I walked along the Great Wall. It was a breathtaking experience. But what really shocked me was that about one hundred soldiers patrolling the wall were calling to me and waving copies of my autobiography, Iacocca. It was a touching scene until I realized they were bootlegged copies. The point is, I was seeing the old ways and the new ways all in one moment. Deng’s son sent me two copies of Iacocca to autograph—one for himself and one for his dad. Who could have imagined it?
The biggest lesson we’ve learned from the Chinese, and again, from the Communists who built the Berlin Wall, is that no wall is strong enough to hold back the tide of progress or to protect its people. Now Israel is building a barrier on the West Bank. How do you think that’s going to work out? Walls don’t work.
Which brings us to the United States. Congress was happy to approve the construction of a wall along our border with Mexico to keep the illegals out—which just goes to show that Congress is always ready to respond quickly to fear. It’s not so good at solving real problems. (For example, they forgot to fund the wall.)
I don’t dispute that security is a legitimate concern. There’s no question about that. We’ve been too lax for too long about devising a workable solution to the problem of illegal immigration. This is what they call a “hot button” issue. It makes politicians nervous. There’s a lot of grandstanding.
But whose bright idea was it to build a three-hundred-mile wall to secure our border with Mexico? The border is two thousand miles long. That’s like triple-locking the front door and leaving the back door open. But even if we built a wall that stretched the entire length of the border, it would not solve the problem.
I’ll go one step further. Even if everybody agreed that a wall was a workable solution, what the hell are we doing building walls? America doesn’t build walls. It tears them down. One of the most inspirational moments of the last twenty years was when Ronald Reagan stood up and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.” And the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.
Countries build walls when they lack the creativity to solve complex problems. And there is nothing more complex than figuring out how we’re going to relate to the world outside our borders. While we’re at it, we have to have a plan for dealing with the eleven million illegal immigrants that are already here.
My immigrant father taught me that there is only one reason why people leave the country of their birth to go somewhere else: jobs. Every immigrant, legal or illegal, comes to America because he wants to improve his lot in life. Most immigrants work hard and make great sacrifices to create better futures for their children. It’s the American dream.
I’ve often wondered where the United States would be today if we hadn’t opened our arms so wide during the great immigration wave of the last century. The seventeen million people, like my parents, who passed through Ellis Island gave birth to one hundred million offspring, and those offspring have made this country what it is today.
In 1982, when President Reagan asked me to serve as chairman of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Centennial Commission, how could I refuse? I had plenty on my plate running Chrysler, but I knew I had to accept as a tribute to my parents—in memory of my father, who’d died in 1973, and for my mother, who was still alive. And we accomplished a miracle that would have made my father proud. We raised half a billion dollars and by July, 4, 1986, the Statue of Liberty was ready for unveiling.
Liberty Weekend dawned with the Great Lady standing tall in New York Harbor, and Ellis Island on its way to being fully restored. In ceremonies that weekend many inspirational words were spoken. I can still remember my feelings of pride and hope. I think we need to be reminded every once in a while of who we are, and what kind of nation we’ve promised to be. Not a nation that builds walls, but a nation that lifts a lamp to light the way.
EMBRACING THE GLOBE
Today, more than twenty years later, we have a rare opportunity to once again demonstrate our commitment to being a global leader. But the challenges have changed. Now leadership involves not just lending a hand, but also lending an ear—respecting the cultures and insights of other nations. There is a lot of enthusiasm for the idea of globalization, but the reality was that people tended to stay in their own corners.
You can lead nations to the global marketplace, but you can’t make them think globally or behave globally. And if this age of globalization is going to be a force for good on the planet, that has to happen.
Around the time the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island were being refurbished, I began to think about what I could do to improve the spirit of global understanding and cooperation.
The idea for the Iacocca Institute at Lehigh University emerged from the question, How do you go about building global leadership? How do you demonstrate to people from different worlds that their commonalities are greater than their differences?
Thanks to the receptivity of my alma mater, Lehigh University, a course was established to teach students how to be competitive in the global marketplace. Then, about eleven years ago, a guy named Dick Brandt came along with a vision for a global leadership school, called the Global Village for Future Leaders of Business and Industry. Dick sold me and Lehigh University on the idea of globalizing the world one young mind at a time.
Dick’s concept was to create a summer training course for promising young businesspeople and entrepreneurs from around the world. We ran a pilot program in the summer of 1996 with representatives from twenty-five countries. There were a lot of kinks to iron out, but I was sold. This was an investment worth making.
Dick’s an interesting guy. Before he took on the program he was a vice president at AT&T, running its international division. In his work Dick became increasingly convinced that the biggest barrier to cooperation, whether in business or government, was that we didn’t understand each other. Dick always says, “We’re doing our piece for world peace,” and I think that’s true. But the funny thing is, there isn’t much talk about war and peace in the Global Village. The spirit of understanding seems to happen automatically through immersion. It’s awfully hard to dismiss someone who’s living, eating, and working side by side with you in an intense setting.
The diversity of the students is impressive. If you visit the Global Village you might find an engineer from Singapore, a Pakistani fashion designer, a Peruvian banker, a shipper from Ghana, a farmer from Mexico, a lawyer from Slovenia, and a doctor from Italy. They all want to succeed.
In the early years of the Global Village, we learned our cultural lessons right along with the students. Here’s an example. In the beginning we provided students with three meals a day of old-fashioned Pennsylvania Dutch cooking. But we started to see that the students were getting fat. Most of these kids weren’t used to eating so much food—especially all the meat and potatoes. We were a little embarrassed about it. Dick realized that food was a core concept. How you eat, where you eat, and what you eat has a lot to do with your identity. Dick thought if we could provide a place for students to cook their own meals, we could solve the problem, plus cut the price of tuition by a thousand dollars. We took over a sorority house at Lehigh and set up a kitchen where students could prepare foods from their own lands. The cooking experiment became so successful that Dick incorporated it into the curriculum. Certain nights were set aside for students to showcase their ethnic cooking for the entire group—often served in traditional garb. It became a highlight of the course.
The most powerful part of the Global Village program is the business project. We put teams together and send them out to cooperating businesses in the Lehigh Valley, with the task of solving a real business problem. In these cross-cultural teams, the students are under pressure to perform by working through their cultural differences. As Dick tells them, “Your competitive edge in a global society will be your ability to transcend differences and collaborate.”
The graduation ceremony at the Global Village is an elaborate black-tie dinner dance. Every time I attend the event, I’m blown away. Last year, the 2006 graduating class consisted of eighty-seven students, and many of them arrived at the dinner wearing beautiful traditional garb. It was a bittersweet moment for them, because they would soon be returning to their countries and saying goodbye to some of the best friends they’d ever made. It was touching to watch them interact. Some of them had been taught their whole lives to hate the very people they were now embracing.
I saw a young guy ask an Arab girl who was wearing a veil to dance, and I thought, “Wow! This is globalization.” I saw two students, one from Beirut and one from Tel Aviv, hugging each other and crying. When they’d left their homes for Pennsylvania, there had been no fighting between their countries. Now there were bombings every day. They didn’t know what they would face when they returned home, but they knew one thing: They were not enemies. This is America’s greatest advantage. People can come here from all over the world and live together in peace.
I said a few words at the dinner. I told the graduates I was writing a book about leadership, and I asked them to help me out. “Write to me,” I said, “and tell me what globalization means to you. Is it a good thing? Who are the global leaders today?”
They took me seriously. Their responses came from all corners of the world, filled with optimism and passion. Yes to globalization. Yes to cooperation. Their enthusiasm was infectious, and I like to think it will infect the world.