Growing Your Business by Going Global

Information on international business: Hungarian market opportunities, meeting ISO 9000 standards, and packing tips.

By Inc. staff | 
 

This Month
Market Intelligence

Hungary is reeducating its people, encouraging a free-market mentality. In the past three years, U.S. investors have sunk $1.8 billion into the country. Is Hungary the new gateway to Europe? (page 2)

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Company Profile

Lori Sweningson of Job Boss was fluent in quality lingo but had never heard of ISO before a customer mentioned it in passing. Now her commitment to achieving ISO certification may transform her company. (page 3)

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On the Road

The well-packed briefcase (page 5)

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The Global Perspective
"I am not enough Master of the Course of our Commerce to give an Opinion on this particular Question, and it does not behove me to do it; yet I have seen so much Embarrassment and so little Advantage in all the Restraining and Compulsive Systems, that I feel myself strongly inclin'd to believe, that a State, which leaves all her Ports open to all the World upon equal Terms, will, by that means, have foreign Commodities cheaper, sell its own Productions dearer, and be on the whole the most prosperous.'

-- Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Robert R. Livingston, July 22, 1783

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"You wake up over the Mideast, over North Africa. As you eat breakfast you look out the window as you're going past and there's the Mediterranean area, and Greece, and Rome. . . . And you finally come up across the coast of California and look for those friendly things: Los Angeles, and Phoenix, and on across El Paso and there's Houston, there's home. . . . And you identify with that, you know -- it's an attachment. . . . And the next thing you recognize in yourself is, you're identifying with North Africa. You look forward to that, you anticipate it. And there it is. That whole process begins to shift what it is you identify with. When you go around it in an hour and a half you begin to recognize that your identity is with the whole thing.'

-- Rusty Schweickart, Apollo 9 astronaut, quoted in Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline (Currency/Doubleday, 1990)

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"The prudent traveler in the former Soviet Union carries soap and toilet paper because hotels may not have any. A light bulb is a good idea. And about two pounds of rubles. The government eased my burden when it issued 5,000-ruble notes (worth $40 in July [1992] but only $12 in December [1992]).'

-- Mike Edwards, "A Broken Empire,' National Geographic, March 1993

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"The Chinese expression 'Shang chang ru zhan chang' translates literally as, 'The marketplace is a battlefield.' That is how the Asian people view the importance of success in the business world. The success of a nation's economy influences the survival and well- being of a nation as surely as does the course of a battle. Asians understand the true nature of business competition. They see it and call it as it is: 'Shang chang ru zhan chang.' '

-- Chin-ning Chu, The Asian Mind Game (Rawson Associates, 1991)

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"The best thing about our victory [in the cold war] is we did it with Levi 501's. Seventy-two years of Communist propaganda got drowned out by a three-ounce Walkman. A totalitarian system has been brought down because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes.'

-- P. J. O'Rourke, "The Berlin Ball,' Rolling Stone, January 11, 1990

EXPLORING HUNGARIAN OPPORTUNITIES

By Albert Warson


New England machinery is pure Americana, fairly reeking of small-town industriousness, inspired tinkering, and Yankee trading shrewdness. It was created in a garage in 1974 by three enterprising packaging engineers -- one of them a Hungarian immigrant sentenced to death, in absentia, in his homeland because of his exploits during the 1956 uprising.

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