Security, Strategy, and the Commercial Enterprise in the Post-9/11 World
President George W. Bush has confirmed what many of us in business already understood intuitively: The new war on terror will be fought not just by governments and soldiers, but also by the companies, large and small, that comprise the global economy — the terrorists' real target.
"Terrorists want to turn the openness of the global economy against itself," the President told executives attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Shanghai recently. "We must not let them."
If we are to surmount the grueling test the free world now confronts, we must adapt both national and corporate strategies toward an unfamiliar but absolutely necessary goal: promoting openness and maintaining security at the same time.
Rising to that challenge, though, will not be easy. Our whole way of doing business has long been evolving toward greater openness and more individual empowerment. But as the assaults of September 11 have shown, transparency and empowerment allow technological, political, and social forces, abroad and at home, to threaten us. Yet to withdraw into protectionism, while a natural instinct, will prove far deadlier than Al Qaeda and its associates.
To read the full analysis by Booz Allen's Ralph Shrader and Mike McConnell, go to strategy-business.com.
story posted October 2001
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