When the doorbell rang, there was a FTD florist delivery truck parked at the curb and a smiling delivery person standing on the stoop holding out a fresh bouquet of pink and yellow roses. The card read simply For Elise. The thoughtful sender had only learned of my granddaughter s birth the day before. How did it happen that these delicate flowers, auctioned at 4 a.m. that morning in Amstelveen in the Netherlands and flown from Schiphol Airport to Newark, New Jersey, should arrive on my doorstep? How did it happen that Del Duca s Florist picked up their standing order for pink and yellow long stemmed roses after the shipment cleared Customs at the Port of Newark and drove them back to their Springfield Avenue shop? How did it happen that the sender selected the bouquet from an electronic catalog, entered a personalized greeting, placed the order, and paid for the service with MasterCard over the Internet during her lunch break?

Competition today is between geographically distributed networks of organizations separate by distance and time.

Consider a global manufacturing company competing for a customer order in Eastern Europe. A contract manufacturer in Khuala Lumpur, Malaysia, employing Chinese laborers, exports assemblies to fulfill an order from a manufacturing center in New Jersey. Twenty-five hours later, these assemblies arrive in New York City as cargo on a Korean airliner. Final production and testing of the product is completed at a factory in northern New Jersey by a Hispanic labor force, and the product...