Sumantra Ghoshal’s research while affiliated with INSEAD and other places

Organizational context is created and renewed through tangible and concrete management actions. The context, in turn, influences the actions of all those within the company. In this article, we elaborate this theme of an interactive development of context and action that, we argue, lies at the core of a company's management process and is a key influencer of its performance. Based on a longitudinal field-study in one company, we identify discipline, stretch, trust and support as the primary dimensions of organizational context and we describe how each of these dimensions can be developed and how these dimensions, in turn, influence the levels of individual initiative, mutual cooperation and collective learning within companies. Shaping the organizational context, we suggest, is the central task of general managers and we propose our model of context as a way to assess an organization's quality of management.

Driven by a set of radical changes in their internal and external environments, large global corporations are innovating a new organizational form. Premised on knowledge and expertise rather than capital or scale as the key strategic resource, this new form is fundamentally different from the multidivisional organization that had emerged in the 1920s and had become the dominant corporate model in the post-War years. In this article, we describe this new organization using Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) as an illustration, and highlight its differences from the classic M-form by contrasting its structure, processes and decision-making mechanisms against the models proposed by Chandler (1962), Bower (1970) and Cyert and March (1963). Our conceptualization of this emerging organization is grounded in a managerial perspective that is very different from the disciplinary foundations of existing economic and behavioral theories of the firm. We conclude by arguing for the need to create a 'managerial theory of the firm' that would be more attuned to the premises of the key actors within the firm so as to be able to illuminate the corporate world as seen by managers and encompass the issues that they perceive to be important.

Riven by ideology, religion, and mistrust, the world seems more fragmented than at any time since, arguably, World War II. But however deep the political divisions, business operations continue to span the globe, and executives still have to figure out how to run them efficiently and well. In "What Is a Global Manager?" (first published in September-October 1992), business professors Christopher Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal lay out a model for a management structure that balances the local, regional, and global demands placed on companies operating across the world's many borders. In the volatile world of transnational corporations, there is no such thing as a "universal" global manager, the authors say. Rather, there are three groups of specialists: business managers, country managers, and functional managers. And there are the top executives at corporate headquarters who manage the complex interactions between the three--and can identify and develop the talented executives a successful transnational requires. This kind of organizational structure characterizes a transnational rather than an old-line multinational, international, or global company. Transnationals integrate assets, resources, and diverse people in operating units around the world. Through a flexible management process, in which business, country, and functional managers form a triad of different perspectives that balance one another, transnational companies can build three strategic capabilities: global-scale efficiency and competitiveness; national-level responsiveness and flexibility; and cross-market capacity to leverage learning on a worldwide basis. Through a close look at the successful careers of Leif Johansson of Electrolux, Howard Gottlieb of NEC, and Wahib Zaki of Procter & Gamble, the authors illustrate the skills that each managerial specialist requires.

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the reflections and perspectives at the millennium. In this chapter the researchers in the field of International Management (IM) witnessed the development of one of the most complex and sophisticated social institutions in human history–the modern multinational corporation (MNC). Over the two decades, a variety of economic, technological, social and political forces have caused this institution to adjust and transform itself fundamentally. The first and most obvious attraction of this field was that the management issues related to MNCs were not only rich, complex, and challenging, but also incredibly important as companies from around the world began expanding into the fast-growing, fast-changing global business environment. One of the most obvious opportunities offered by the IM field was to study management processes under the most extreme conditions that challenged many of the administrative systems and managerial models developed for relatively simpler, single-environment organizations.

Most managers today understand the strategic implictions of the information based, knowledge driven, service intensive economy. So that they are recognizing that skilled and motivated people are central to the operations of any company that wishes to flourish in the new age