Global or local

One of the speakers on the International Business conference brought up an interesting question. There was a speaker from General Electric and she talked about its company’s work more that 100 countries in the world. With their program ecomagination they try to fix environmental and social issues in those countries. And one student asked whether this global focus in detrimental to the local communities? He asked that maybe we focus too much on the issues abroad and tend to miss up on some local problems. And GE representative agreed that this is a concern among various social organizations that there is too much resources that are going abroad with efforts to cut costs through outsourcing that the local issues blur and don’t get as much attention. This being said, GE tries to address the issues of local production versus international. They follow IBM global solutions on this issues saying that “insourcing” can be done. As we discussed in class companies work with foreign communities which leads to high environmental damage, but also hurts local communities because there is not as much jobs and education provided to them. GE mentioned that sustainability is not feasible to achieve in a certain area due to economies of scale. The issue should be addressed globally.

This is another reason why companies like GE and Wal-Mart are important to sustainable business development: they have enough resources to (1) absorb costs of sustainability and (2) they know about local issues and global issues, social and ecological, often more that a governments country because they operate locally and abroad simultaneously.