The more I work with my colleagues in India and China, the more I come to realize what economic powerhouses these countries are going to become.  And I’m putting my money where my mouth is: a few days ago, we bought our first shares in a few Chinese companies, hoping to tap into the extraordinary growth that is going on there.

I often think about the intellectual firepower that is developing in these countries, in their universities and technical schools, and think about the possibilities it has to completely change the business landscape over the next thirty years.

I was reading an interesting article in the New York Times this morning, entitled Is China the Next Enron?  It was written by Thomas Friedman, who also wrote The World Is Flat (which, incidentally, is a great read).  He had this to say:

Now take all this infrastructure and mix it together with 27 million students in technical colleges and universities — the most in the world. With just the normal distribution of brains, that’s going to bring a lot of brainpower to the market, or, as Bill Gates once said to me: “In China, when you’re one-in-a-million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.”

I’m headed out to Beijing in two weeks to run a series of workshops.  It’s my first trip to mainland China, and I’m excited about it.  Visiting India and seeing the transformation there, firsthand, changed my outlook.  I suspect seeing China first-hand will do the same.