From Local to Global: Smart Management Lessons to Grow Your Business by Evan J. Segal is a business leadership book that explores the best practices of how to expand your company into the global marketplace. Despite its small size, the book provides information on everything from new product development to marketing to supply chain management.
The book’s running case study is of Segal’s manufacturing firm Dormont, the world’s leading producer of flexible stainless steel gas appliance connectors. Segal posits that the practices he shares are relevant to business situations universally. In each chapter, he introduces new concepts and provides examples from Dormont’s history, illustrating them in action. Segal ends each chapter with a wrap-up entitled “Lessons Learned” highlighting the main takeaways.
While Segal shares his experiences in a refreshingly humble and almost reserved manner, the complex and manufacturing-specific terminology of his case study makes the reading dense at times for the layman business person. In addition, the book presents its information too economically for the multifaceted concepts it tackles; for example, the information allotted to “Performance Management Processes” — a concept many have dedicated entire books to — is confined to a mere three paragraphs. As such, it feels more like a concept overview than concept practices.
From Local to Global shines in its “Lessons Learned” wrap-ups, which condense deep concepts into manageable bites. Another highlight is Chapter 2, “Strategic Growth,” which takes a mammoth topic and effectively boils it down into a brief but useful five-phase process that covers fact finding, plan formulation and strategy development, plan implementation, and plan updating.
From Local to Global is a direct overview of almost every key management concept related to business development. But given its textual challenges, it’s difficult to recommend the book in its entirety. Readers will save time without missing key points if they focus solely on the second chapter on strategy and the 10 “Lessons Learned” sections.
Also available in hardcover and ebook.
