Emerging markets have a unique opportunity that most will squander.
The other day I wrote a post about thinking bigger and now see that the concept has applicability to countries as well as startups. I took a day trip to Medellin yesterday to talk, along with my friend Conrad Egusa, with the management team of a multibillion dollar corporation with almost 200,000 employees. They are taking a serious look at Colombia and, particularly, Medellin. It really made me think about something that I’ve stated verbally but don’t think I’ve written here. That we are living during a moment in history when a number of things are shifting (e.g., economic power, penetration of digital tools, etc.). Many countries (particularly, in emerging markets) such as Colombia can either decide that the future will be much different than the past and start making decisions commensurate with the opportunity before them or squander their window of opportunity and forfeit a much brighter future to emerging market countries who have more insight into this new global context.
This event reminded me of the beginning of the year when an agency in Boston, Massachusetts (Jim and Sandy) reached out to me through my blog here because they were planning to visit Colombia. For anyone reading this who needs confirmation that writing a blog and connecting with the outside world is rewarding, this should be proof enough. In that case, I was able to connect them with the national government as well as my Founder Institute alliance partner, Ruta N, and they ended up having a tremendous visit. In this case, it wasn’t a case of connecting them with others (they had that covered), but more a matter of giving them the low down from a bicultural perspective on what we see here.
Going back to the session we had yesterday morning in Medellin with this impressive group of visitors. First of all, it was impressive to see that the whole management team from the Chairman and CEO were present. I just looked at their corporate website and it’s and looking at the management team pictures it’s amazing to see that they were all here. It was really stimulating to follow their thought process in terms of analyzing the potential for doing business in Colombia and the types of deep, penetrating questions that they asked.