Being a certified veteran of various boom-and-bust cycles in Silicon Valley, I’m always amazed at the human tendency to assume that the good times will last forever. North Americans, especially, suffer from this cultural blind spot – it is both a strength and a weakness in their national culture.

Being able to plan for the downtimes during the uptimes (sort of like viewing the ‘glass half empty’) is just as important a skill as planning for the uptimes during the downtimes (akin to viewing the ‘glass half full’).

The Glass as Half Empty

For many of us, business is better than it has been. I would challenge you, then, to plan for the downtimes – whether that means a point in the future when the economy will dip, or your business sector takes a nosedive, or your own function becomes obsolete or is outsourced.

Depending on the maturity of your company and your industry sector, you may benefit from focusing on one or more of the following areas. Whatever the topic, your goal as a manager should be to spot the trends and to be ready to act on them at the appropriate time.

Put Your Financial House in Order

Ensure that your financial procedures and reporting are set up to enable you and your managers to spot trends (whether positive, negative or in between), so that you can make your decisions with confidence. I am always amazed to find that there are still billion-dollar companies that consider themselves to be global, even though their financial officers cannot provide a breakdown of sales/revenues/expenses by geographic region, country, etc. to the employees who need this critical information. Until localization or globalization – or whatever term you prefer – is a line item for each department within your organization, your financial house is not in order.

If you are a localization services provider, check out Exchange Risk and Localization Budget Planning (premium). Small- and medium-sized enterprises often resist establishing an exchange risk strategy because they are unsure exactly how to do it. In this article, Jack Yang, Strategy Analyst for Transco, outlines the basic steps to be taken and describes concrete strategies to be implemented to equalize the risk between both buyers and sellers of localization services.

For insights into how the U.S. military continues spending millions on controversial language programs (how about phone numbers on water bottles that Iraqis can call to report “suspicious activities”?!), why Latvia will not be spelling euro as euro, how mid-tier language service providers continue to carve out a growing niche for themselves, and how angel investors keep putting money into the business, read the latest installment of John Freivalds’ column, Money Talks (premium).

Learn How to Manage Your Human Capital

Once your financial house is in order, you can then turn to the much more complicated – and yet potentially rewarding – challenge of learning to effectively manage your human capital. In the “old days,” it was all about creating and executing a business plan to expand gradually into international markets – those of us responsible for international business basically viewed the world as a set of national markets. Now, it’s about a company looking at the world in a “holistic way,” i.e., interpreting it as a source for the scarce knowledge and critical expertise that it needs to integrate into all of its business functions, not just in its sales/marketing/support activities.

Globalizing a company’s business processes requires managing human capital in order to “get it right.” In many markets and industry sectors, it’s no longer good enough to tailor your original processes as international expansion takes place. Your competition can do that. What is required is to really analyze the process in question and to determine how to implement it as you compete globally. For example, can your customer service organization efficiently process all non-English emails received on any given day? If not, why not? What is required to move them to that point? Is it justified now? In 6 months? In a year?

You need to sit down with your managers and put together a plan with milestones and metrics to manage your human capital, in the same way that you manage your other resources. It’s not impossible, but it won’t happen unless you commit to doing it. Need help? Check out LISA Globalization Consulting Services to help you get started.

And if you think that you can put this off, think again – even India is beginning to experience problems in its outsourcing sector. Read One Night at the Call Center, by Chetan Bhagat, in which he provides a fictional account of one eventful night at a call center handling customer queries for a U.S.-based computer and appliances company. The book traces the story of six call center agents whose difficult boss, unreasonable customers, and low self-esteem take such a huge toll on them that only a phone call from God can bail them out of the crisis. My personal favorite …

An instructor preparing trainees for the job scribbles a golden rule on the blackboard for handling difficult customers: 10=35.

"Remember, a thirty-five-year-old American's brain and IQ is the same as a 10-year-old Indian's brain ... Americans are dumb, just accept it. I don't want anyone losing their cool during the calls..." the instructor tells the class.

Now – Not Later – Is the Time to Implement Best Practices

As you put together a short-, medium- and long-term plan to effectively manage your human capital, it is the perfect time to figure out how to adopt, adapt and implement best practices in whatever area of the organization is the weakest. One area that many managers are starting to face head-on and to rationalize is their global information management challenge. If you develop or sell global content management solutions, then don’t miss out on the opportunity to participate in the 3rd edition of Managing Global Content. More than 600 people have downloaded the previous editions, as they make their decisions about which solution to adopt and how to implement it. Submissions are due by January 31. For more details, visit http://www.lisa.org/products/gcms/sponsor.html.

Part of confirming what best practice really is for any given area always involves professional surveys. We invite you to participate in the Global Business Practices Survey, designed to examine the planning strategies for implementing global business imperatives at the local level. We are running the survey in collaboration with The Center for the Globalization and Localization of Business Exports (GLOBE) at the Fisher Graduate School of International Business at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS) and with input from the World Bank. By responding to the survey, you will help establish the baseline against which to compare your global business requirements and practices.

Aaron Marcus is a visionary in the field of user interface (UI) design for the web, wireless devices and productivity applications. He was recently named a "Master of the 20th Century" by the International Council of Graphic Design Associations, the professional world body for graphic design and visual communication. In his article, Development of a Future Wireless Information Device, (premium) Marcus outlines best practices and future trends in UI design through a project for Samsung Electronics.

Network During the Uptimes, Not the Downtimes

Everyone networks during the downtimes, as they seek possible partners, look for a new job, etc. The key is to have a networking plan for the uptimes, so that you are already prepared when the downtimes hit. Assign a specific person within your organization to attend and report back on your industry-sector events, as well as related ones – again, with the ultimate goal being to spot the trends and the actions to be taken before your competitors do.

From April 18-21, take the opportunity to build your expertise and expand your network in China, through attending the LISA Forum China Focus in Shanghai. At this event, we expect to surpass our record-breaking performance of 52% of conference attendees representing the customer. For unrivaled content and globalization/localization business expertise, don’t miss the China Focus program, especially if you are operating in the Asia Pacific region.

We will be offering some new workshops in Shanghai, including ...

1. How to Maximize the Use of Localization Industry Standards, by Andrzej Zydroń, Chairperson of LISA’s OSCAR Steering Committee and CTO at xml-Intl Ltd. (Read How to Leverage the Maximum Potential of XML for Localization.),

2. and one by yours truly, From Cleveland to Shanghai: How to Run a Globalization Audit of Your Business Processes.

Registrations are proceeding at a brisk pace, so if you are interested in speaking, click here. In exhibiting, click here. And click here to take advantage of our 10% discount by registering for both the Forum and a Workshop today!

There are other events going on where you can network as well. The most important event in China in the field of terminology standardization is Terminology: Standardization and Technology Transfer. The theme for this year’s event on August 25-26 in Beijing is Terminology in the Information Society and for the Emerging Knowledge Society.

You may also want to attend the Outsourcing World Summit, to be held in Orlando, Florida from February 20-22. It will also be the annual meeting for the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP).

The 29th Internationalization & Unicode Conference in Burlingame, California on March 6-8 is the premier technical conference for both software and web internationalization. The new program committee has created a revitalized program that is relevant and engaging for the internationalization community, and it is now offering a $50 discount off the registration fee for LISA Members. If you register by February 1, you can save an additional $100 off the tutorials and $100 off the conference. That’s a possible total discount of $250! For more details, read 29th Internationalization & Unicode Conference: Hot Topics in Internationalization, Globalization and Localization.

If you are an ‘SME’ – a small- to medium-sized enterprise – and you intend to grow beyond a lifestyle business, you should always have a backup plan for when and how to be acquired, should the opportunity arise with a carefully chosen partner. This is exactly what Smith Yewell, CEO and President of Welocalize in the U.S. and Eugene McGinty, CEO of Connect Global Solutions in Ireland have put together over the last 15 months. The result? A merger that places first priority on the needs of each organization’s clients and employees. Unusual to say the least.

Instead of focusing on the redundancy possibilities (the teams in both companies will stay in place to continue to support Welocalize’s unique professonal services delivery model), the goals of the two executives were (1) to ensure that their teams worked together to understand and leverage the best practices of both companies and (2) to ensure for their clients that they would create an organization out of the merger that would meet their growing needs in the future.

The result of this very long and careful process is that the merger has been a morale booster for the employees in both organizations as they now know how one another works and what their strengths and weaknesses are. They also have access to more of the very scarce resources that keep the localization industry moving forward.

And the clients? They are “jazzed,” as the North Americans say, because they now have an excellent choice for a mid-tier localization services provider that is both strong and healthy. There are often difficulties with very large vendors scaling down and with small providers scaling up, and it is the mid-tier niche that this merger intends to fill. Going forward in 2006, the new organization will concentrate on organic growth while looking for a few other acquisitions, e.g., to help it expand in Asia beyond Japan.

(For more details on the merger, check out the press release and Money Talks in this issue.)

In 2005, LISA and The Association of Support Professionals (ASP) collaborated to produce the first Year’s Ten Best International Web Support Sites Awards Program. In conjunction with ASP’s prestigious Ten Best Web Support Sites competition, the program was designed to showcase excellence in online customer service and support worldwide. It was open to any organization that provided support sites in three or more languages. And the winners (in alphabetical order) are …

• ATI
• Dell
• HP (Global Consumer Operations)
• HP (IT Resource Center)
• Intel
• McAfee
• Microsoft
• Sony
• ViaTraining
• Xilinx

To find out why each site was recognized and how you can adapt some of the same strategies to better support your global customers, watch your mailbox for the email from LISA that will announce the availability of the book, Best International Web Support Sites.

And keep your eyes on this space for our February issue, which will be dedicated to the Middle East and Africa. If you would like to participate, please contact me at Rebecca@lisa.org.

As the regular readers of this editorial know, I have kept you up-to-date on the news along the main road to Iraq through Turkey, which passes our cattle ranch. In the past, there have been unmarked Mercedes buses with U.S. soldiers heading to the Turkish border (a war front that didn’t exist, according to the U.S. Government), the infamous supply trucks which often don’t return with their original Turkish drivers, bomb materials smuggled out of Iraq which have exploded … And now the latest entrepreneurial venture to hit our highway: Prado SUVs with fake plates from Oman, Kuwait and the UAE and the packing material still stuck to their front fenders, being driven at high speeds to be delivered to only-the-U.S. Government knows for sure … There’s never a dull moment in our neighborhood!

A belated Happy New Year!