Table Of ContentBLOC BY BLOC
B L O C B Y B L O C
HOW TO BUILD A GLOBAL ENTERPRISE FOR THE
NEW REGIONAL ORDER
STEVEN WEBER
Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts, London, England
2019
Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
First printing
Cover photograph by Luemen Carlson, courtesy of Unsplash
Cover design by Tim Jones
9780674243705 (EPUB)
9780674243712 (MOBI)
9780674243699 (PDF)
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed
edition as follows:
Names: Weber, Steve, 1961– author.
Title: Bloc by bloc : how to build a global enterprise for the new regional
order / Steven Weber.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019010209 | ISBN 9780674979499
(hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Trade blocs. | Economic geography. | International
economic relations. | Globalization.
Classification: LCC HF1418.7 .W43 2019 | DDC 658/.049—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010209
CONTENTS
Preface vii
1 To Reach the World 1
2 The Logic of Globalization for Global Enterprise 26
3 The Era of the Globally Integrated Enterprise 53
4 What Went Wrong? 80
5 Ingredients for a New Economic Geography 117
6 How to Or ga nize 148
7 Organ ization and Outcomes 177
Notes 217
Index 237
PREFACE
I must have started thinking about this book around thirty- five
years ago when I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and had my first
personal encounter with economic geography. Or at least with economic
geography that r eally mattered but was not about New York. I was lucky
to be living in Palo Alto and watch the digital revolution kick into high
gear. I realized I had a front- row seat to the modern experience of Silicon
Valley, when in 1984 one of my friends whispered in my ear about this
new machine that her com pany, Apple Computer, was about to release. It
was called “Macintosh.” I was doing clinical rotations in medical school
at the time and the absolute last t hing I needed was a personal computer
at home. I definitely c ouldn’t afford one. Naturally, I bought it anyway.
More than a de cade later I became fascinated with open- source soft-
ware communities and the experiments with intellectual property and
governance that they were engaged in. I was lucky enough to have a job
at UC Berkeley that allowed me to follow my instincts t oward a new sub-
stantive area of thinking and research, and to do it in some nontradi-
tional ways for an academic.
I have worked with some extraordinarily generous and talented p eople
over the years. They granted me phenomenal opportunities, and I was
able to combine my academic research and teaching with corporate and
government advisory work in ways that made the whole greater and def-
initely more fun than the sum of the parts. I have always cared about
theory but equally about practice, and I learned in the consulting
viii preface
business that it takes more than coherent arguments and falsifiable
hypotheses to change the world. You really don’t understand your own
arguments fully unless and until you can see and articulate clearly what
should be done with them and why. I’ve come to believe that the most
valuable social science is urgent social science, the kind that has direct
implications for the t hings that human beings care about the most.
It’s that sense of urgency that inspired me to write this book. New in-
formation technologies are changing radically the po liti cal economy of
nations and of the world as a whole. The spatial dimensions of that
change— economic geography— are going to be the most impor tant de-
terminant of what life is like for individuals and socie ties going forward.
How people understand that geography and act on those understand-
ings now w ill shape what the strong do to press their advantages and
their vision, and what the weak do to compensate, respond, arbitrage,
and sometimes play spoiler. The purpose of this book is to inform those
understandings so that p eople can act to make the outcomes better on
the w hole. As obvious as that sounds, it takes clear- headed thinking and
conviction to make it true. I hope the arguments in this book w ill con-
tribute to both.
Human agency is a big part of the reason I chose to write this book
in a somewhat less formal style and to lace in a personal anecdote h ere
and there. I want to highlight the point that while economic geography
does have within it big structural ele ments that form the basis of my
argument, how those ele ments manifest in the world is in practice a
story about people making decisions. And so how people make those
decisions, at the time and with the knowledge and models they have
when they make them, is a very impor tant part of the story of the past
as well as of the f uture.
I had an enormous amount of help and support from friends, col-
leagues, and institutions as I worked through these ideas. It really
would take another chapter to list them all and describe their contribu-
tions, so I hope you w ill all accept my thanks in this simpler way. I am
particularly grateful to my colleagues and students at UC Berkeley in
the School of Information, the Department of Po liti cal Science, and the
Center for Long Term Cybersecurity; to my collaborators across the
United States in the Bridging the Gap proj ect; to my colleagues from
preface ix
Global Business Network in the 1990s and the Monitor Group a fter that.
Digital life for me would be unbearable without my snarky text ing bud-
dies (and occasional coauthors) Nils Gilman and Jesse Goldhammer.
And I need to thank deeply my advisory clients in the private and public
sectors, and in par tic u lar the strategy group at IBM in the early 2000s,
where I was lucky enough to help a group of courageous thinkers grapple
with the logic of the globally integrated enterprise. That logic grounds
this book, even though I now believe and argue h ere that the world has
moved past it. How and why that happened, and what comes next, is the
prob lem this book is meant to solve.
I had financial support for this work from the Car ne gie Corpora-
tion of New York and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Por-
tions of Chapter 6 were first published as “Data, Development, and
Growth,” Business and Politics 19, no. 3 (2017): 397–423, copyright © 2017
by V. K. Aggarwal, and are reprinted here with permission of Cam-
bridge University Press.
I dedicate this book to Regina, who is the perfect best friend, a co-
survivor of New York Giants fandom, and every thing else a person could
imagine in a partner. She reminds me also to thank our feline children,
Napoleon and Mrs. Peel, who occasionally made unauthorized edits
while sleeping on the keyboard. The cats are certain they made this a
better book.
