World Briefing

Seeing the Social Network
Getting down to work is a very social matter. That's because employees are much more likely to turn to one another for information than to any other source. But managers are often completely in the dark about the design of such social networks. When networks organize themselves, they can drain coordination, learning and performance. The solution, according to The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations, is to make the network visible. By studying workers' interactions and not just the official chain of command, managers can spot such problems as "bottlenecks" (in which one worker is overwhelmingly depended on by many people), "peripheral people" (who aren't tapped often enough and tend to be much less satisfied in their jobs) and "disconnects" (which can be caused by something as simple as a group being split between two floors in the same building). "Most managers think, to improve collaboration, they need to go to an off-site or bring in a new technology," says Rob Cross, one of the book's authors and a management professor at the University of Virginia. "But this is just as much about reducing excess connectivity. Networks give an X ray of how work is getting done, and that can be very different from how managers think."

The Real China Thing
China's biggest soft-drink maker is shipping its patriotic pop to America. This spring, Wahaha, based near Shanghai, exported its first batch of Future Cola--435,000 half-liter plastic bottles to Los Angeles and New York City. The drink, known in China as Extreme Cola, was designed to provide a domestic alternative to market leaders Coca-Cola and Pepsi. "What they can do, the Chinese people can do as well," says Shan Qining, a Wahaha spokesman. (Never mind that French yogurtmaker Danone owns 51% of Wahaha.) But the homegrown alternative has yet to pose a challenge to the American biggies, which account for 67% of the market in China, according to Beverage Digest. In the U.S., Wahaha already has a toehold: last year it sold $1 million worth of its sweet milkbased drink for children, AD Gai Nai, which it says "promotes brain development." But can the future of Future be America? In a competitive market, that's not a no-brainer.

The Myths of Offshoring
As the outcry over U.S. corporations' hiring white-collar labor abroad grows ever louder, an expanding body of research and analysis suggests that a job gained overseas isn't necessarily a job lost at home. According to a study by Matthew Slaughter, an associate professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, during the decade ending in 2001, U.S. firms hired nearly 3 million workers abroad, up 42%. At the same time, companies also expanded their U.S. work forces by almost 5.5 million, or 31%. Often, "as firms expand or sell in foreign markets, they have to hire people in the U.S. to coordinate logistics and manage," says Slaughter. One example, he says, is Wal-Mart, which has added nearly 1,500 jobs in Bentonville, Ark., since the mid-1990s to coordinate distribution of goods to new stores in 10 other countries in Latin America, Europe and Asia.