In a global economy, money always searches for value

William Polushin is founding director of the Program for International Competitiveness at the Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, and President of AMAXIS, an international business and operational development services firm. The Competing to Win blog series can be found here.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

- Warren Buffet, CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

In the world of business, there are a few words that stand out among the rest in the minds and hearts of owners, entrepreneurs and managers. One of these words is value.

In strategy, we talk about value proposition and value chains; in marketing, customer value; in finance, shareholder value, net present value, and value investing; in operations, value engineering. The list goes on.

At its core, and as reflected in the Oracle of Omaha's quotation, value in the market economy is 100 per cent tied to the buyer. The you is the customer or client, and if you aren't satisfied with what a business, supplier, vendor, service provider etc. is offering you, you have this habit of taking your business elsewhere.

Customer reaction to Research In Motion's recent service disruption is case in point. In the era of immediacy, users of the BlackBerry had little patience for the reasons behind the outage. They wanted access to their e-mails and browser functions -- and now! And the fact that RIM couldn't deliver as expected - even it was a matter of days - provided various RIM customers around the world with sufficient reason to jump the BlackBerry ship (not just today, but also as it pertains to their future smartphone purchasing decisions) and head into the open and welcoming arms of competing producers such as Apple (USA), Samsung (South Korea), Motorola (USA), HTC (Taiwan), Nokia (Finland), or Sony Ericsson (Japan/Sweden). Welcome to the world of global competition!

Read full article: The Globe and Mail, October 20, 2011