CHAPTER 12
Country Evaluation and Selection 465
An intriguing possibility is the near-officeless headquarters for international companies. Technology may permit more people to work from anywhere as they e-mail and teleconference with their colleagues, customers, and suppliers elsewhere. Thus they can live anywhere in the world and work from their homes, as is already occurring within some professions.62 However, if people can work from their homes, they may move their homes where they want to live rather than living where their employers are now located. Because we're talking here about highly creative and highly innovative self-motivated people, they can usually get permission to live in almost any country of the world. A leading researcher on urbanization and planning has shown that beginning at least as early as the Roman Empire, these types of people have been drawn to certain cities that were the centers of innova-tion. He says that this attraction is due to people's improvement through interchange with others like
themselves—like "a very bright class in a school or a college. They all try to score off each other and do bet-ter." Thus, if he's correct, the brightest minds may work more at home but still need the face-to-face interaction with their colleagues.63 His arguments are provocative, particularly because we now have technology to allow people to communi-cate without traveling as much, yet the continued increase in business travel shows that people need face-to-face interaction. He further suggests that these people will be drawn to the same places that attract people to visit as tourists. Concomitantly, another view is that in leading Western societies, the elite made up of intellectuals and highly educated people is increasingly using its capability to delay and block new technologies. If successful, their efforts will result in the emergence of different countries at the forefront of technological development and acceptance.64
Burger King Beefs Up Global Operations urger King is the world's largest flame-broiled fast food restaurant chain.65 As of mid-2009, it operated about 12,000 restaurants in all 50 states and in 74 countries and U.S. territories worldwide through a combination of company-owned and franchised operations, which together employed nearly 400,000 people worldwide. Only Yurn Brands (A&W, KFC, Long John Silver, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell), McDonald's, and Subway, with 36,000, 32,000, and 28,000 restaurants, respectively, were larger. Given that Yurn Brands has no hamburger units, Burger King is second in the fast food hamburger restaurant segment/mar-ket. Burger King plans to increase the number of net operating units by 3 to 4 percent per year in the near future, with most of that increase coming in international operations. Two major ways in which Burger King differentiates itself from competitors are the way it cooks hamburgers—by its flame-broiled method as opposed to grills that fry—and the options it offers customers as to how they want their burgers. This latter distinction has been popularized with the "have it your way" theme. About two-thirds of Burger King's restaurants are in the United States, and its U.S. and Canadian operations accounted for 69 percent of its $2.54 billion revenue in fiscal 2009. The geographic distribution of Burger King's restau-rants is shown on Map 12.2. Although the company began in 1954 by offering just burgers, fries, milk shakes, and sodas, the menu has expanded to include breakfast as well as various chicken, fish, and salad offerings. Nevertheless, burgers remain the mainstay of the com-pany, and 2007 marked the 50th anniversary of the Whopper sandwich, which is considered Burger King's signature product. Burger King has also differentiated itself with some innovative advertising campaigns through the years, such as its use of a figure of a man who is the Burger "King." Recently, the company ran a "Whopper Virgins" campaign in which it assembled people who had never tasted a burger—such as from remote parts of Greenland, Thailand, and Transylvania—to participate in a comparative taste test between Whopper sandwiches and Big Macs. The Burger King logo has changed slightly through the years; for example, going from two buns separating a burger to two buns separating the company's name.