David Houle, Owner at David Houle & Associates (http://www.davidhoule.com), joins us to discuss the global business trends of the future and how your company can gain a competitive edge by applying them in the coming year... Read the Transcript

David Houle Owner David Houle & Associates http://DavidHoule.com

David Houle is a futurist, strategist and keynote speaker. He is often called the "CEOs futurist" having spoken to or advised 1200+ CEOs and business owners in the past three years. Houle spent more than 20 years in media and entertainment. He has worked at NBC, CBS and was part of the senior executive team that launched MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1 and CNN Headline News. He has won two Emmys, the prestigious George Foster Peabody award and the Heartland award and was nominated for an Academy Award. He writes the highly regarded futurist blog www.evolutionshift.com with the tag line "A Future Look At Today".

In this article we explore global trends that will affect they way that companies do business outside their home country in 2011 and beyond. Overall, these trends speak to larger change occurring globally where the players and processes differ from what everyone used to know. Global alliances dominated foreign relations for centuries, but the most crucial element to understand is that these alliances contain some of the world’s biggest markets.  The emerging trend here is the use of alliances to reenforce not only the country’s political standing but their markets as well.  We will explore the trend of localization efforts having isolating effects on global businesses leading to losses of brand identity or a new way to discuss a global brand as a conglomeration of smaller local brands. Massive online collaboration has become a very popular way to tackle projects of all sizes because everyone can work on it at the same time and any time. The trend here is scaling the large projects and how companies will coordinate such an effort. Given shifts in demographics opportunities will shift depending on the products or services rendered. With technological advances and the increase in communication, countries that have long been overshadowed by some of the larger ones out there have opportunities to showcase what they can provide. Countries will continue to demonstrate their abilities by showing that they can not only distribute their goods anywhere but that those goods are high quality. Companies from many countries will seek every opportunity presented to them to make their businesses successful and that includes jumping into this global market full speed. To turn these trends into a competitive advantage in 2011, consider the following. Keep your eye on emerging global alliances. Localize in moderation in balance with globalization. Use massive online global collaboration for the right tasks. Track global population changes to target your next market. Lastly, surprising new global markets might be just right for your business. Argentina, Uruguay, and others hold tremendous potential. Look for more on these trends and others right here in 2011.