The Beaten Path and the Road Less Traveled: Doing Business in Established and Emerging Countries

This Element is an excerpt from Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today’s Profit and Drives Tomorrow’s Growth (9780137083640) by Inder Sidhu. Available in print and digital formats.

Why some Western companies succeed in emerging markets, while others fail catastrophically.

A single millimeter. That’s all it took to sink the Whirlpool Corporation’s dream of developing a washing machine that would serve the needs of customers from Mumbai to Mexico City. The time was 1990, when going “global” held the promise of hundreds of millions of new customers for executives of Western companies. The lure was irresistible, but….