The most interesting thing I learned from this manufacturer (surprisingly, manufacturing employs just over 20 per cent of the workforce, while agriculture, a big exporter, employs 5%) was that one of his efforts to create business, if not competitive advantage, is moving downstream.\u00a0\u00a0He will work with a manufacturer to create a new flavor, and (for a fee?) not sell it to others in the same product category, providing research and development assistance to the small and medium sized companies he serves.\u00a0\u00a0In addition, he will provide his expertise to his clients to purchase the right machinery.\u00a0\u00a0Forecasting has got to be a great challenge since he has no \u201ccaptive\u201d audience; it\u2019s difficult to get new business, but he said if the manufacturer is satisfied, he seldom changes a supplier\u2014too much risk of a \u201cdifferent\u201d taste.\u00a0\u00a0Some of his ingredients take 2 or 3 months enroute (cocoa comes from Africa) further muddying his ability to manage supply and demand.\u00a0\u00a0As he pointed out, he has a large warehouse to anticipate demand.<\/p>\n
The second business was a service business that exemplified the flat world.\u00a0\u00a0It was an advertising agency that stressed its ability to deliver creative services globally.\u00a0\u00a0One ad they showed us found a market in Canada, the United States, and Thailand, for example, proving, as one CEO I met in India in 2001 pointed out, the right business can be headquartered anywhere.\u00a0\u00a0The two entrepreneurs who integrated their production company forward, adding an advertising agency, were passionate in their presentation about their creative abilities, and some of the spots they showed us certainly demonstrated that they\u2019d taken a lot of film-making skills and added them to the world of marketing.\u00a0\u00a0My favorite was a coffee ad with a hand coming out of the coffee cup slapping someone awake.\u00a0\u00a0I did not need it for their presentation!<\/p>\n May 15, 2014 Buenos Aires, the harbor city situated on the enormous delta of the Rio de Plata, has a population of around 3 million.\u00a0\u00a0The area around the city is roughly 13 million of Argentina\u2019s 40 million.\u00a0\u00a0Thus, it gave us a wider look at life in Buenos Aires when we went about an hour out … Continue reading “I Could Fall for Buenos Aires”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fdib-latin-america-2014"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3039"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7281,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3039\/revisions\/7281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/files\/2014\/05\/P5160445-150x150-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/a>It really hit me as we drove through their neighborhood looking at wonderfully solid homes of the rich (their office was a converted one-family many-room mansion that still had some elegant touches) that we were in the southern hemisphere.\u00a0\u00a0As I looked up the street, I saw a beautiful sugar maple that was orange and red, rather like the one outside my home in Bloomington\u2014in late October.\u00a0\u00a0Here, 31 degrees south of the equator, it is climatologically mid-November.\u00a0\u00a0If you love fall (and I do) you might consider moving to the southern hemisphere when it\u2019s spring up North\u2014if that\u2019s not too confusing!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"