INNOVATION & TECHNOLOGY: "A Power Play For China's Electrical Grid: With Beijing budgeting $600 billion to upgrade its network, global giants are racing to plug in," by Bruce Einhorn, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, 28 December 2009 & 4 January 2010.

Naturally, IBM is all over it. Why? If you want to be the best, you want to play in the biggest league, and the pro league always differs from the college game primarily on the basis of speed!

To cure a Texan of his belief that everything is bigger in Texas, send him to China. Four months ago, Brad Gammons moved from Amarillo to Beijing to help IBM land some of the $600 billion the Chinese government plans to spend over the next decade on its electrical network, especially on smart-grid technology to boost efficiency. Now the 50-year-old IBM vice-president marvels that "the scale and pace of how things move here is not something you experience anywhere in the world."

Awfully true, as China's demands are unprecedented. To compare, our smart grid effort rings in at about $8B.

Already, we're smarter though. China "consumes about four times as much electricity as the U.S. per dollar of gross domestic product and eight times what Japan does."

God bless those clever Japanese!

Of course, every Western giant flocks to China, so IBM can only corner so much (expecting $400M over the next four years). It's just that everybody wants to be part of this unprecedented effort at making a hugely inefficient system that much more smart. The scale of the effort alone means that the resulting market can be turned outward toward the rest of the world.

This has been my basic advice to Western companies for close to a decade: get to China and participate--whatever it takes--and then jump into the wider race of taking that technology to the rest of the emerging world. Because God knows the Chinese will steal everything they can and do the same if they can.

Which, of course, makes them the most capital of capitalists.