Global Gigs at the Digital Frontier

Kas Kalba's consulting trek has taken him to 100+ countries

Kalba International's co-founder has recently completed a memoir on his multi-decade trek to digital frontiers.  Unlike Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne's lead character in Around the World in 80 Days, his trek involved far more stops (Fogg and sidekick Passepartout made only nine) and took many more years.  In all he has worked in 125 countries, some online but mostly onsite, from Argentina to Poland to Timor-Leste and Burkina Faso to New Zealand to Bahrain.

When asked his favorite country, he invariably answers, "The next one."  Why?  Because early on he decided to target further-away places.  This came as a reaction to the U.S. multinationals of the time whose cross-border revenues, often under 20% of the total, came mainly from Canada and the United Kingdom.   Yes, important countries to focus on but not the end points for an aspiring global consultant.  Add to this, his curiosity about how mobile phones and the internet were being used differently across the world only grew the more places he visited. 

In Part One of Global Gigs Kas Kalba takes the reader on a consulting tour through Japan, France, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Bahrain, Thailand and Ukraine. He then segues to Tanzania, Senegal, Kenya, Ivory Coast and other frontier countries in Part Two.  Across these cases there are insights on how business is done, how digital innovation takes hold (or often doesn't), the government role, and the things that go wrong, including a project manager who contracts malaria, a client who requests a kickback, an explosion courtesy of Al-Shabab just as a gig is starting up, and advice that misses market realities.  There is also the discovery that the frequent claim that everyone has a smartphone is far from true.  

Throughout Global Gigs, he addresses how to serve clients from diverse cultures, comparing large family-owned ones (such as Hong Kong's Hutchison, Katherine Graham's Washington Post and Carlos Slim's America Movil) with corporates like AT&T, NTT and Orange.  And he dissects some joint ventures with owners from different business cultures, including a hyper conflicted Brazilian-Korean one.  Perhaps most relevant in the current context are his takes on Google, Facebook and Netflix expanding to Africa's and Asia's digital frontiers, without always understanding what prevents locals from signing up to their services.  

Plus, there are encounters with Presidents, business titans and tech gurus.  And eye-opening sessions with taxi and Uber drivers ("sit next to them, not in the back, if you want to understand what's happening locally") as well as unyielding customs officials, including in the world's hardest-to-enter country for consultants (an OECD member but not one anyone has guessed so far) and the hardest-to-leave.  These occur as Kas and his teams help clients set records in lowering service prices, keeping competitors at bay, avoiding the winner's curse in spectrum auctions, and meeting other business challenges. 

Global Gigs also reveals how a Chinese group installed a national fiber network in record time followed by local workers disrupting it more than once, why Apple mistook India as its next boom market, and when to shake a Muslim woman's hand after a meeting (and, more importantly, when not to).  You may want to read it before your next trip abroad, whether traveling via Zoom or your preferred airline.  Read it to understand how both the traditional and digital worlds are far from flat, whatever you may have heard before.