No Prisoners, No Excuses

From the bus, it’s straight to a breakfast buffet then into the conference room where British Airways has a lineup of experts ready to talk global business.

“Globalization does not take prisoners,” says Lord Digby Jones, the former British minister of state for trade and business ambassador at U.K. Trade & Investment. “This is Asia’s century, and how we all play that will define commercial success…for the next 100 years.”

Jones gives his take on globalization in a conference room. His audience is operating on virtually no sleep, but at least we’ve been fortified with an English breakfast of sausages, eggs, bacon, pastries, fruit, and coffee or, naturally, tea. Outside, the buzz of traffic on the busy street separates the conference room from the serenity of the park.

The fulcrum of world business, Jones says, has shifted from Europe in the 19th Century to North America in the 20th, and that fulcrum now runs straight through the Middle East, dividing the West from those fast-growing giants, India and China. And, with America’s emergence from the economic crisis, it’s time for her entrepreneurs to turn their attention to the world.

“I think your challenge is how you take all that…global. Imagine what you can do with six or seven billion consumers.” If we don’t rise to that challenge, he says, “Our children will never forgive us.”

After Jones comes one of the top international lawyers in the United States.

“We are living, finally, in a true global marketplace,” says Andrew Sherman, a partner in the Washington office of the giant Wall Street law firm Jones Day. “I hate to be the sobering speaker…(but) most people know a lot more about us than we know about them. I feel a little bit like I’m preaching to the choir. But for the couple hundred people that came, there are thousands of U.S. and Canadian companies that are talking a good game,” but not following through.

We don’t even know our own resources, he points out, and by way of illustration he asks how many people in the room know what the U.S. Commercial Service is. Only a few hands rise. Turns out, it’s the arm of the U.S. government devoted to promoting trade.

And Sherman adds that Enron, WorldCom, the banking crisis, and the Bernie Madoff and Alan Stanford financial scandals have damaged the level of trust worldwide. “You can’t build trust on LinkedIn. We shouldn’t get to the closing table without knowing someone,” he says.

By now, about 11:30 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time, the crowd has thinned, as exhausted entrepreneurs sneak out to catch some rest before the next big event. At noon, we break up and settle into our rooms. I suspect that most of those on the trip, like me, are too wired to sleep before the next event.

By 3:30 p.m., we’re on a bus to the Orangery, an ornate room on the grounds of Princess Diana’s onetime home, Kensington Palace. It’s four o’clock when we arrive, and dusk is already falling at this latitude. The room fills rapidly, the buzz of networking bouncing off its high ceilings as the group sips wine and nibbles canapés.

I step outside. It’s quiet out here in the gloaming. Over at a table, a man and his are smoking Marlboro Lights, and I join them. He, it turns out, is a man who knows London well. He was a Scotland Yard detective before becoming an entrepreneur. Now, he runs an eco-friendly seawater-desalination outfit in Baja California, Mexico.

I wander back inside in time to hear a pitch to the gathered entrepreneurs from the man who has played Donald Trump’s part on the British version of The Apprentice, Sir Alan Sugar. Sugar founded the electronics company Amstrad in 1968, and launched an early PC in 1984. Sugar also owned the Tottenham Hotspur soccer team from 1991 until 2001.