You, as a recent graduate of the School of Business Graduate School (where your skills in international marketing have been sharpened considerably) are considered to be one of the "best and brightest" of the new generation of global thinking young business managers. As noted previously, you are also a "demanding" type, who wishes to make a unique contribution to the organization for whom you work, and as such are not ready to accept and employment offer from a large corporation right away (if ever).

Because of this, you spent a good deal of time exploring your employment options and after much deliberation on the numerous opportunities you took a job with a small business located in Richmond, Virginia. While you had many offers to work with larger, well established multinational firms located around the world, you chose to accept this smaller firm's offer because you thought it would give you more opportunity to hone you strategic management skills, take responsibility, make decisions and perhaps make that unique contribution to a small but growing company. All of these dimensions are most important to you. Your thoughts were correct, and you were given a significant challenge right at the start of your employment with your new company, located in Richmond, Va.

Your new Richmond employer - "The World Art Group" (WAG - see - http://www.theworldartgroup.com/ ), has grown rapidly by supplying the local, regional and greater U.S. and Canadian markets (both consumer and business markets) with high quality but very affordable "wall decor" - beautiful, unique, high-quality images ranging from traditional hand-colored and embellished art to contemporary giclee and poster prints.

But as you know, the U.S. and Canadian markets (like most "developed markets" - e.g., Japan, Europe, Australia) represent economies with significant competition and waning growth. In short, "first world" economies, in your opinion, were moving from being preferred markets to "no-so-promising markets," particularly for the products that the WAG markets.

You also believed that in the current business world-wide mega force, often called "globalization" is likely to continue over the coming decades. As such, you were and are convinced that WAG needs to look for other markets around the world that could offer them sustained growth and long-term prosperity. Your vision remains to take the company "global" into Big Emerging Markets (BEMs)

Indeed, your efforts to persuade top management at the WAG, and your skills at explaining the meaning and significance of globalization, along with your ability to systematically analysis global markets (using "the method" your learned at VCU, involving the evaluation of global market opportunities based on concepts such as the "golden straight jacket" and "market opportunities" and "competitive strengths), has led top management at WAC to support your "global" vision. Still top management remains skeptically of your recommendation for WAG to consider only "big emerging markets.

You have indicated to top management that BEMs represent the future and more specifically one of more of the following markets should be targeted for WAG's global expansion - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and/or the United Arab Emirates.

Again, however, you have a challenge facing you which needs to be dealt with if your global vision for WAG is to be realized. You must develop a strategy that will lead WAG into the most promising of these big emerging markets.

More specifically, the board needs to be convinced that you can lead their entrance and establishment into one or more of these BEMs. They want specific recommendations as to which of the noted 20 BEMs are most promising (and why is this so) and they want to know what WAG needs to do in order to be successful in the best BEMs.

Issue: You again have just a short time to prepare a brief report for the board at WAG. What will your report say?

(Hint: You may want to consider including in your report a discussion of - 1) why firms, such as WAG, should be thinking globally during the 21^st century, and more specifically about BEMs, 2) how you would approach the task of deciding which of the 20 BEMs is best for WAG (a brief analysis demonstrating the "method" for analyzing and selection the best of the 20 BEMs notes for WAG would be wise), and 3) why strategic alliances are critical for future success of the BEMs and how you plan on deciding which strategic allies are most promising in selected BEMs.

Limit your response to no more than four (4) pages (double spaced, 12 point font, reasonable margins, with your name at the top of the document), excluding any graphs or charts that you might want to include in your answer. Feel free to use any sources in your report (on-line material, VCU library material, popular press materials, etc. - but be sure that the proper citation of any sources you use in your report, are available in your "reference" list).