Winning plays and winning ways in master customer management

Business has undergone phenomenal change in the past 20 years as a result of various economic, social, and poli tical events including Black Monday in 1987, the reunification of Germany in 1990, Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Netscape's world famous 1995 initial public offering, the Thai Baht and Russian currency crisis of 1998, the technology wreck of 2000, and the credit crunch of 2007. Looking at change from a cumulative economic perspective, China today stands third to the United States powerhouse as measured by its contribution to global gross domestic product. This is in stark contrast to China's relevance in the early 1980s, where she was merely a blip on the economic world stage. So what does this change, in its various forms--emergent, episodic, incremental, continuous, transitional, transformative--mean? Quite simply, it means opportunity even for the most cynical personalities out there.