Last year was a year of turbulence for everybody interested in international trade and movements over borders. We saw commodity price changes that nobody could foresee. We saw people movement due to different crises, taken to new levels. We saw politics going crazy in many countries. International media seemed surprised. What is going on?
What we saw was globalization. The real thing. Twenty years ago scientists and researches talked about globalization and I remember reading books about what globalization would look like. We didn’t know what it was. Nobody knew. Well, now we know.
Last year more than four billion people used the airline industry. There are more people on Earth with smartphones than people with access to clean water. Facebook, a social media network that didn’t exist twelve years ago had more than 1.5 billion users all around the world, connected together and interacting with each other. Imagine the power in that! The video of Korean rapper, PSY, doing his ‘Gangnam Style’ hit song has been viewed 2.522.012.876 times on YouTube – when you read this probably more – an Internet media channel that was introduced not more than ten years ago. This is another face of globalization.
There are challenges with globalization, no doubt about it, but also endless possibilities. We have only seen the very first crawling moments of the potential of internet and the information society. In the future the revolution will amaze us over and over again. I am convinced that in the long run this development will be a good one for the world, especially for the developing world.
Globalization has had a major impact on the area I write about in this blog. We are starting to see global value chains emerge in more and more production chains and supply chain security is today not something we talk about but a reality. We will have to do more in these fields in the future. International institutions will have to develop new standards and new models for a new kind of global trade, as an example there is an urgent need for new standards and models for e-Commerce. We need to start real development on models to handle a massive breakthrough of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises on the global trade level, how these companies can have full access to our trading systems while Government still ensuring safety and security. These are challenges for our nations but also for the major international institutions. We have done it before and we will do it again.
This is why globalization – and its possibilities and challenges – will become one of the topics that I will write a lot about in this blog over the following years. Globalization is not only the flavor of the day, it is the topic of the future. Some might even say that globalization is the new black.
Those who know me know that I always keep my promises. I promised to be back. Well, I am back.
I started my blog larskarlsson.com in 2005. It was an adventure and I love new things and to get a chance to write about things I like through a new channel was a great opportunity that I fully embraced. Since then I have posted blog texts almost every day for more than ten years. I write about things of interest for me hoping that it will also be of interest to you.
It was time to reform and modernize my website after ten long years that passed by very quickly. I am a firm believer in doing things, not only to talk or write about them. In life I have three overall principles, first – it has to be for real (1). I never do anything that is fake, it has to be real. Only the real thing matters. Secondly, I always keep my promises (2), and thirdly do it now (3) since you have the capacity to do it now. Don’t wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow might be too late. I like the NFA Coach Steve Mariucci, who once said: “I never wear a watch since I always know it is now – and now is the time to do it”.
My initiative in 2005, to create a blog about things like customs, government, international trade and some other things like my beloved soccer – and naturally Zlatan Ibrahimovic – was really just a test to see if there could be an interest from others to read about topics like this. I knew that I was interested in these topics and that I wanted to write about them. However I soon discovered that many people are interested to read about globalization, international trade, Zlatan and all the topics covered by my blog. In October last year (2015), more than ten years after the start – when I decided to do a break and modernization of the blog, more than 14.000 people read my blog every month. That is a huge number for these types of topics! I am humble and grateful to all of you for this massive interest for my texts and the news feeds I have submitted. I genuinely hope that all of you will find your way back to this new website and that in addition new people will join us – the Capacity Building family – on this platform.
Most of the time I have written about things like; customs, borders, trade, reform, development, capacity building, sport, music, film and naturally – Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Ibra has a special place in my heart and in my texts. But so have also the other topics. I will continue to write about the areas I love, but in the future there will be no limits. I will write about anything that contributes to the overall goal of bringing capacity to the world, not tomorrow, but today. I want Capacity Now!