Sunday, September 16, 2012

Tracey Keys and Thomas Malnight — The Exploding Business of Bartering

What do Honda, Haymarket Exhibitions, and your plumber have in common? Bartering. Business bartering is big, and it's happening at every level. The International Reciprocal Trade Associationreports that in 2011 over 400,000 companies worldwide used bartering to earn an estimated $12 billion on unwanted or underused assets.
Our Global Trends research, along with discussions with senior executives around the world, show that in response to tighter credit and budgets companies are exploring new ways to create and capture value. In this context, they see bartering as a way to steer around the restrictions imposed by cash and credit, to extract value from perishable or underperforming assets, and to expand channels to market and find new customers.
Harvard Business Review | HBR Blog Network
The Exploding Business of Bartering
Tracey Keys. Director of Strategy Dynamics Global SA, publisher ofwww.globaltrends.com, and Thomas Malnight, professor of strategy and general management, IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland, where he directs the Leading in a Connected Future Research project


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I suppose creativity should be celebrated. But it seems to me that the reversion to bartering in preference to money-mediated exchange, is evidence of a massive systemic failure - and also additional attempt by the wealthy to escape the public.

Tom Hickey said...

Whenever firms or individuals (households) resort to bartering in any scaled trend, there is something amiss. The transaction cost of barter is significantly higher, and under ordinary circumstances inefficient.