Rethinking Multinational Corporations in a Global Economy
Mr. Gary Tooker
Chairman of the Board (Ret.)
Motorola, Inc.
Good Afternoon, everyone. Let me welcome you also to the IGM here in beautiful Honolulu. You've seen the summarization of the panel this afternoon, and I think we have an outstanding set of speakers for you. In addition to that, as my thirty-eight year career in Motorola I have a little bit of experience of multinational, to give you an example of what the changes that I saw in a particular period of time: If you take from 1988 to 1995 Motorola sales grew from 8.1 billion to 27 billion, but that really wasn't the major change. The change in our business went from one-third of our sales being outside the United States to two-thirds by 1995. And this past year our sales were over thirty billion and two-thirds of our sales were outside the United States with about twenty-five percent of it here in the Asia-Pacific region.
Since out time is relatively short I would like to just give you two or three things to think about which might stimulate some questions on your part when we get to the Q&A. First of all the diversity of issues facing multinational companies today, both in from a technology point of view, the development of strategies and bringing together the consolidation of various industries; as well as in line with the title of this year's conference, "New Horizons: Economic and Political…" insulations and changes with regard to political landscape (New Horizons: Economic and Political Implications of the Changing Global Landscape), we need to look no further than Seattle to understand the implications that that might have with regard to multinational leaders.
We tend to think of ourselves as creators of jobs and wealth, sharers of technology, improvers of the quality of life, contributors to communities and committed to communities, but apparently we're not getting that message through too well. because in Seattle words like 'exploiters of labor and the environment and natural resources, only interested in profits for shareholders, insensitive to cultural differences, having no commitment to anything but the bottom line' were the kinds of words we heard. So indeed, the economic aspects of multinational leadership are important, but also the political aspects.
In addition to that, governments themselves are concerned that multinational corporations, by their global reach, are alluding national controls and the influence that national leaders think is important with regard to their aspect of their particular countries.
From a technology point of view of course, the internet and e-commerce is something that all of us have to deal with. The issue of being able to have a customer won; being able to communicate from any point in the world through e-mail or e-commerce to any other place in the world is something that we certainly have to learn to understand and utilize. Particularly the relationship between e-commerce and business to business commerce going forward will be an aspect that will be evermore important. And so there's certainly in addition to the historically important organizational structures and the give and take between the regional structure and the product structures, there are many other things to think about.
Our panel today is made up of two leaders of very large, global corporations and a gentleman who has to deal with many of the global corporations, and one of them was and is Motorola, so I think we can get some diverse views of some of these issues and have a good session; and hopefully, it will stimulate some questions and answers. We'll go in the same order as the introduction: first, Mr. Munekuni of Honda, then Rudolph Schlais of General Motors, Dr. Y.Y. Wong from the WyWy group. thank you for joining us.