After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, many observers predicted that the spread of globalization would be stopped cold. However, that has not been the case, and globalization remains one of the crucial trends confronting every business today.

To understand why, let's take a few moments to examine this trend, its drivers, and some of its more important implications.

Globalization is the dynamically networked world system that replaced the static, bipolar world order that defined the Cold War period, beginning in roughly 1946 and ending in roughly 1989.

The central organizing principle behind globalization is: The more you let market forces rule, and the more you open your economy to free trade and competition, the more efficient and flourishing your economy will be. The foremost objective of globalization is the spread of free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world.

Americanization has become the cultural default of the globalization system, because American products have largely won the battle for the hearts, minds, and pocketbooks of consumers worldwide. And, since American products largely embody American cultural norms, those norms are influencing people everywhere.

The defining technologies of globalization are: computerization, miniaturization, digitization, satellite communications, fiber optics, and the Internet. And these technologies helped to create the defining perspective of globalization: "integration." The symbol of the globalization system has become the World Wide Web, which unites everyone.

The defining measure of competitiveness in the new world of globalization is speed. The winners are fast, while the losers are slow. That includes speed in commerce, travel, communication, and innovation. It's this focus on speed, and particularly the speed of innovation, that makes globalization seem so disruptive.

In today's global marketplace, the winners move at a breakneck pace to replace what works today with something that will work better tomorrow. Joseph Schumpeter, a former Austrian Minister of Finance and Harvard Business School professor, was probably the first economist to express today's reality in his classic work, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

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