The Future of the U.S. Business Model and the Rise of Competitors

Executive Overview For at least two generations, the United States provided the most important model for organizing business activities. Explicit efforts to export U.S. ideas about economics were part of an effort to counter communism, but equally important were lessons about how to structure and operate individual business, transferred in part by U.S. multinationals but also through the power of example. The rise of extremely successful economic competitors operating with different business and economic models in the 2000s provided counterexamples to the U.S. approach and coincided with concerns about the merits of U.S. practices, driven first by accounting scandals in the late 1990s and accelerating with the Wall Street financial crisis of 2008. These twin developments have called into question the future role of the United States as a model for business in the rest of the world. The articles in this Exchange consider the future of the U.S. example in the competition for influence along with other models that are competing for attention from the world business community.