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The Director of the International Business Center at Michigan State University – Tomas Hult – just published the new version of the Total Global Strategy (TGS) book with George Yip. TGS has been the market leader both in multinational corporations’ board rooms and in executive MBA programs for years. From General Motors using the TGS framework to restructure their Asia operations to Michigan State University using it in its world-leading executive training programs in supply chain management to being rated as a top 30 business book previously, Total Global Strategy is the authority on practical and sophisticated global strategy development and implementation. TGS can be bought on Amazon and at all major booksellers.

Total Global Strategy tackles industry globalization potential and a firm’s alignment between its global strategy and the industry’s globalization potential. TGS then focuses on five critical global strategy levers (global market participation, global products/services, locating global activities and supply chains, global marketing, and making competitive moves globally). TGS also helps build the global organization worldwide or with a regional focus, offers concrete measures of all aspects of the firm’s industry, strategy, and organization – and concludes with a very hands-on and practical how-to chapter on conducting a global strategy analysis. The 2012 version of TGS includes critical updates and revisions throughout, with a major emphasis now being on the notion of outwardly focused as opposed to inwardly focused global strategy. This means that global strategy today is a mechanism to engage the global marketplace, align the firm with partners and other collaborators, and center attention on global customers (as opposed to a focus on only building the infrastructure of the global firm as a way to be more effective and efficient when an industry is ripe for globalization).

Total Global Strategy


George Yip is a native of Asia, and a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States. He is a professor of management at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai in China, where he is also co-director of the CEIBS Centre on China Innovation. He divides his time between London, Shanghai, and Maine, USA. He has been a professor at Erasmus, London Business School, Cambridge, Harvard Business School, and UCLA. Professor Yip is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business and one of the foremost experts in the world on global strategy.

Tomas Hult, a native of Sweden, and a dual citizen of Sweden and the United States, is the Eli Broad Professor of Marketing and International Business and director of the Eli Broad International Business Center (IBC) at Michigan State University. He is also the executive director of the Academy of International Business and a Fellow of AIB. IBC is the developer of globalEDGE, the world-leading online source for “international business resources” (per all major search engines). Professor Hult was the 75th most-cited “scientist in economics and business” in the world for 1997–2007, per the ranking provided by Thomson Reuters. He is one of the world’s leading experts on research and practice at the intersection of global strategy and global supply chain management.

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