Portfolio.com: What trends make you most optimistic or pessimistic?

Sherman: Well, on the optimistic side I think that small companies are finally learning ways to harvest innovation into revenue streams and profit centers. They’re finally learning ways to develop brands, they’re finally learning ways to engage Web 2.0 tools in ways that can grow their business. They’re getting smarter.

The things that make me…concerned…the things that…keep me up at night as an advocate for small and growing companies is we still have a lot of work to do in terms of access to capital and cost of capital. So that concerns me. Another thing that concerns me is that, while we are learning better how to compete on a global marketplace, we are still not taking the time to learn as much as we need to about other people, how they consume and what they consume and what they buy and why they buy it. What are the cultural differences when you go into another country? What are the language differences? It’s not just about selling into another market or getting the website to be bilingual. It’s about really understanding what’s happening inside those markets. How are those consumers behaving differently than a U.S. consumer…do they buy differently? Do they talk to their fellow consumers differently? All of those aspects of being a global company—and you can learn that for small companies just as well as you can learn it as a large company if you invest the time.

Portfolio.com: One of your areas of expertise is in helping companies to grow. Can a company grow smartly today without taking globalization into account?

Sherman: I think they could have some limited success. I mean, look, we are still a pretty robust set of consumers. And if you’re a regional company say in the Southeastern United States, there’s still a lot of the country you’ve not penetrated. But at some point you’re going to get contacted or you’re going to have an interest in a foreign market and it may be Canada or Latin America. And the other thing is, even if you’re not expanding into that country, it doesn’t mean that you’re not consuming. I mean, it’s very hard these days to be a truly domestic company. Almost no company, you could say, is completely domestic. Even your local restaurant down the street, your favorite restaurant, may be buying some of its ingredients or supplies from abroad. It may never have locations there. But in some ways we’re all pretty global these days. Even back to my local-restaurant example: You may be local in nature, but you may be serving a community of people that come from all over the world and therefore need to be a bit more global in your thinking.

Portfolio.com: What are some of the greatest opportunities out there for companies that want to go global, and what are some of the greatest pitfalls?

Sherman: Sure, in terms of opportunities, let me beep my horn for a minute as a patriot and a citizen. We are still the king of entrepreneurship. We as a country know more about entrepreneurship and starting ventures and launching ventures and getting things started than any country in the world, bar none. No one exports more of their franchise systems than we do around the globe, even to the tune of almost tenfold in terms of the next largest country with a franchise system. So we have a number of areas, whether its entrepreneurial education, training, best practices, business planning and franchising. We have all these areas where we are still very much the world leader, and I think we need to leverage those better and take advantage of them better in terms of more revenue streams and opportunities. The same thing goes with things like venture capital investing, angel investing.

As far as threats. We do need to get serious about what’s going on in manufacturing and what’s going on in technology. We’re losing our edge in some of those areas. I think we dropped this year in corporate R&D spending from first in the world to fifth or sixth. That concerns me.

The science and education and mathematical skills of kids coming up from this next generation—Generation Y or Gen Z, whatever letter we’re assigning to them—is very troubling compared to India and China and other parts of Southeast Asia. In order to remain competitive, we’ve got to have some scientists, physicists, engineers, mathematicians.

We’re turning out too many journalists, lawyers, and public relations consultants. We do have an educational imbalance. When you look at it in the context of global business, that’s a concern.