Now the Hard Part - Thoughts from Sam Palmisano, President and CEO of the IBM Group

This is pulled from the the August 2008 edition of the Vietnam Economic Times

The fourth challenge is the toughest of all; winning and hearts and minds. Not primarily of the CEOs and heads of state - they are not the problem. It's not the other management layers, the people who make decisions at the regional and agency levels - and especially the public at large: communities, individuals and populations that do not yet see themselves as the beneficiaries of global integration.

To do that, to make that case, we will need fact-based, reasonable, multilateral approaches. And one other thing: we must recognize that the opposition to global integration really does have a point when it comes to environmental, economic and societal impacts; to job creation, education and skills; to access to connectivity and other resources; and to the inherently global problems of crippling energy costs, unsafe drinking water and pandemic-scale disease. We may differ on the best solutions to these problems, but we can't just keep saying, "Free trade! Free trade!" and think will carry the day. We can't rely on arguments from 1990 or, for that matter, 1890.

This will require multi-disciplinary, cross-boundary dialogue and approaches - not only in business but also in national and geopolitical action and decision making. The problems and the solutions of the global commons, the flattening world, by their very nature cross those old boundaries. We must, too.

Over the past decade we have witnessed a great debate on how societies should deal with competition, conflict and opportunity on a planet that is rapidly integrating. Within policy circles this is often framed as the debate between the so-called "realists" - those who look out and see a future of multiple competing nation-states, where the job at hand is to acheive a "balance of power" - and another view that foresees the rise new superpowers, with one or another of them ultimately achieving dominance.

Neither of those perspectives seems particulary hopeful to me - nor does either of them seem truly global. Happily, over the past few years, a "third way" has emerged. It's often called "soft power" or, more recently, "smart power."

I can attest to the efficacy of this approach. My own company, IBM, was once the paradigm of a business "superpower". We dominated our industry. But such dominance is always fleeting, and outs fled. Yet, unlike most empires that fall, we didn't disappear. Instead, we asked very hard questions, made very hard decisions and reinvented ourselves - becoming far more open, far more collaborative and far less hierarchical.

To me, that's "smart power" within a particular company, and in the world of business.