Andrew Sherman likes to think of himself as "cautiously optimistic" as he ponders what 2010 holds for entrepreneurs and business owners. And one bright, shining prospect for Americans willing to take the chance is potential global success, says Sherman—a partner at the Washington office of global law firm Jones Day, the author of 17 books, an adjunct professor in the MBA and Executive MBA programs at the University of Maryland, and an adjunct professor in the MBA program at Georgetown University.

This week, Sherman shares some of his thoughts on globalization and its impact on small and mid-sized businesses as part of Portfolio.com’s ongoing series, The Great Global Business Adventure. This is the first of a two-part interview with Sherman. Today, we talk with him about the general picture for companies competing globally. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about what it takes for a company to go global, from studying a market to choosing a company structure. Sherman’s comments have been edited for brevity.

Portfolio.com: First, a general question. How does globalization affect the entrepreneur’s ability to grow their business?

Sherman: I think that globalization opens up markets that would have never been opened before due to technologies, due to breakdowns in cultural barriers, due to people just feeling and being more interconnected than they ever have in the past. The advent of social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook and others all add to that. It’s like the perfect storm for global business where small companies can compete as effectively as big companies. But that doesn’t mean it’s a piece of cake. It just means the admission ticket to the show is more open than it has been.

Portfolio.com: Do you think most entrepreneurs in the United States think in terms of a global economy?

Sherman: Well, with the state of our economy right now, they have to. You have, for the first time probably in our history, not just one or two but dozens of economies growing faster than ours that need to be considered, and you don’t have to get super-exotic with this stuff, just looking to the north and doing business in Canada is cross-border and the Canadian economy, the Canadian dollar, has been remarkably strong at a time of global weakness. Even starting small: If you’re in the South of the United States looking at Central America, if you’re in the Western United States looking at Asia, if you’re in the Eastern United States looking at Europe, and if you’re in the Northern United States looking at Canada. I mean, taking some baby steps towards understanding what it means to sell products and services abroad, using resources that your tax dollars pay for (such as the U.S. Foreign Commercial Service), when you’ve got people in over 100 offices around the world…all designed to bring U.S. products and services to foreign marketplaces, and not just products and services made by big companies, but products and services made by small and mid-sized companies.

Portfolio.com: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the ability of America’s entrepreneurs to compete in the global economy?

Sherman: I’m cautiously optimistic. I think 2010 is going to be a good year, but I define good as being better than 2009. You know the feeling that you have when you avoid an accident and you pull over to the side of the road and you say, Wow, I feel really good that I’m alive…that’s a different type of optimism than…when your company is growing like crazy and you’re adding all these new customers and all these employees and projects. You know the type of optimism we have now is just the ‘I’m not dead, I’m still here’ optimism. Which is good optimism relative to last year’s pessimism, but it’s not the type of optimism that’s going to grow our economy domestically or globally…. We’re trying to create a set of economic conditions where business can thrive, not just survive.