Great article on the Starbucks in the Forbidden City in Beijing (and the power of blogging) in Friday’s Wall Street Journal. We will visit the Forbidden City on our trip.

Is this an example of globalization, or, the erosion of Chinese culture?

I am also curious … if you were the person at Starbucks who had to make the call re: whether to put that store in the Forbidden City in the first place, what would you have decided, and why? What if you were the person at Starbucks with this flap now sitting on your desk — what call would you make re: keeping this store in place or removing it, and why? Oh, and by the way, after your boss at Starbucks gives you one of these tasks, he/she says as you head out the door at the end of your meeting “Make a good decision. Don’t screw this up,” and that’s all the guidance you receive. To help your analysis here is a related WSJ article, Starbucks Pours It On In China, which will help you learn more about Starbucks’ strategy in China.

Welcome to being a manager and a decision maker in business, where this mess is now on your desk to own and clean up (or screw up to the detriment of your career), and not the underling below doing the grunt work who gets to go home at 5:00 pm.!

You know those big blue bins you roll our to your curb each week in SLO? Ever give pause to consider where all that plastic and paper you put in them goes? Try … China.

One of your classmates in the MBA program works for a local firm that helps process these materials at Cold Canyon Landfill just outside town. As I understand it, your plastic and paper/cardboard is culled out then shipped (by truck or train) down to Los Angeles, where the middleman sells it to a Chinese firm who then loads in onto a cargo ship bound for China. What happens to it next? Check out this wonderful NY Times article about one of the richest ladies in China and her recycling business and firm, Blazing a Paper Trail [subscription may be required].

What I love about this article is that it highlights yet another example of how their are some really, really, smart people out there who are very entrepreneurial making a lot of money doing things like this that some snobs in business would consider to be too lowbrow for them. Also, what a great article highlighting good sustainability practices. … paper/plastic used in the US, put on a ship to China, recycled, then used for packaging for products that come right back to California, and then the cycle starts all over again.

Check out my earlier related post relating to plastics/MBA Polymers, and this Forbes article China Launching Green Buildings Project, and this NY Times article Venture Capital Nation: A Light Bulb Goes On, and China Starts Thinking ‘Alternative Energy’.

And this issue and article relate directly to what Professor Ramezani asked you last week — what opportunities can YOU spot to jump in on to make a living and make the world a better place as capital, labor and investment moves around the world?