The American Multinational, Unbowed

As the business pages inform us, Tata Motors of India has bought Jaguar from Ford, Chinese car manufacturers are aspiring to become international companies, and Cemex of Mexico is the world’s largest ready-mix cement company. At a moment of economic insecurity in the United States, these challengers from afar have been depicted as sweeping over the American economic landscape to devastating effect. But the authors of Globality (Business Plus, $26.99) maintain that economic Armageddon may not, in fact, be at hand. They demonstrate that the traditional multinationals still have advantages — in the form of skilled human resources, management expertise, innovative capabilities, brand reputations and overall economies of scale. . .

Many American chief executives, it turns out, are aiming at emerging markets. If it’s true that those markets are among the most crucial economic battlegrounds of the coming decade, it is just possible that American companies will win more than they lose. And they will find many insights into prevailing in those battles in this book.