I wonder how you say "It's the Customer, Stupid!" in Russian or Portuguese. I should ask my brother-in-law, Richard Cox. He has spent tons of time in Russia and other parts of the world building plants for Fluor-Daniel Construction.

I recently learned that the publishing rights for my new book were just purchased in Russia and in Brazil (Portuguese). I found it interesting that the Russians were the first non-English speaking country to step up and acquire the rights from John Wiley & Sons, my publisher. I didn;t even know Wiley was shopping the book.

I recall an earlier book that I co-authored with Jeff Slutsky, "The Toastmasters International Guide to Successful Speaking"(Dearborn Publishing/1996), was reproduced without permission in China. One of my colleagues actually mailed me a pirated copy. She tells me they translated it word for word.

I investigated taking legal action but found it would cost more to protect the copyright than I could ever expect to get. Go figure. Today, the number one language spoken in China is English as it is now taught in all the schools. It would not surprise me to see the new book get pirated as well.

Richard Cox once told me that when he was building a plant in China, the Chinese were replicating it board-for-board, brick-for-brick right down the street from the plant he was building. I guess it's easier to help yourself to other's creativity than it is to pay for that engineering on your own. That, in fact, could be the very undoing for societies that find it more convenient to steal than to create.

The economy of Russia is the tenth-largest in the world by nominal value and they boast of the sixth largest purchasing power. Brazil's is just as competitive, eighth in gross domestic product and seventh in purchasing power.

Russia's abundance of natural gas, oil, coal and precious metals coupled with their agricultural prowess make them a power to be dealt with in the world economy. The country is 1.8 times the size of the United States and boasts an economy of $1.231 trillion (State Department/2009). Some 142 million people in Russia descend from more than 100 ethnic groups.

Russia has undergone significant changes since the collapse of the Soviet Union, moving from a centrally planned economy to a more market-focused and globally-integrated economy. Capitalism seems to be catching on!

I guess that's why some entrepreneurial ventures thought it profitable to acquire the publishing rights for "It's the Customer, Stupid!" I'm hoping other countries will follow to give the book a truly global presence.

It will be interesting to see how the Russians and Brazilians will translate all my red-neck colloquialisms that appear in the book along with all the tongue-in-cheek, in-your-face humor. I guess the customer service is just as lousy everywhere as it is in North America.

As prodigious as the legitimate Russian economy is today, I suspect the hidden variable is the huge underground economy. The size of the so-called underground economy began to show an upward trend in 1996 and has profoundly affected tax revenues as a share of the GDP.

If you want to know what is happening in the underground Russian economy, one needs to only think about something as simple as bread consumption. The government's own statistics show that people are eating more bread but bakeries are selling less.

Or you could consider another Russian staple, vodka. Distillers are able to produce far more vodka than is officially being sold. However, given the Russian's love of the latter, there is every reason to believe that the stills are cranking out the product 24/7.

Richard Cox is currently building a plant in Azerbaijan, the largest country in the region of Europe and Asia, commonly referred to as "Eurasia." Located in the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, it is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia (the other one) to the northwest, Armenia to the west and Iran to the south.

Muslim represents over 93% of the population across the country and, according the State Department, the country enjoys a 99.5% literacy rate. Baku is the capital and Azerbaijani and Russian is predominantly spoken. I wonder how you say "It's the Customer, Stupid!" in Azerbaijani.