Suzanne Berger

Suzanne Berger offers business leaders the richest insights available today into how to compete effectively in today’s global economy. She is one of the world’s leading researchers into how globalization works, its practical affects on domestic economies, industries and companies, and how this should shape competitive strategy.

 She is the author of How We Compete: What Companies Around the World Are Doing to Make it in Today’s Global Economy, which is based on a five-year study by the MIT Industrial Performance Center. This is the first book on globalization to go into the trenches of international business to see which practices and companies are succeeding, which are failing, and why.

She is a coauthor of the landmark 1990 book Made In America, the biggest-selling book in MIT history, and of several other books on global competition.

Suzanne Berger is Raphael Dorman and Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science at MIT and the director of MIT’s International Science and Technology Initiative Program.

She is a Principal Investigator for the MIT Globalization Study of MIT’s Industrial Performance Center, where she led the team that did the research for How We Compete.

International. The global character of Dr. Berger’s research and her experience as a speaker in Europe, especially, make her unusually valuable to audiences outside North America, as well as to North American audiences with global operations. She is fluent in both French and Italian.

How to Compete

In industry after industry, jobs have moved from the U.S. to low-wage countries like China, India and Mexico, generating a lot of fears about the threats of globalization. Suzanne Berger and the team of MIT researchers she led have interviewed more than 500 companies in a wide range of industries, asking which parts of the manufacturing process they outsource, who their biggest competitors are, and how they plan to grow their business. How We Compete presents their fascinating, and often surprising, conclusions.

First, cheap labor is not the answer. Labor costs are almost never the major factor in global competitiveness and rarely a good reason to move operations overseas. The key factor determining viability for a company or an industry is its network of suppliers.

Second, there are many different ways to win in the global economy, and that the avenues open to American companies are much wider than we ever imagined.

How We Compete is packed with valuable insights into globalization across a large range subject areas, making Suzanne Berger a speaker of unusual versatility combined with significant depth of understanding and creative business intelligence.