Managing Across Borders

"Even within particular industries, worldwide companies have developed very different strategic and organizational responses to changes in their environment."

"The classic barrier to globalization has always been rooted in the difference in national market structures and consumer preferences."

"More and more businesses are being driven by simultaneous demands for global efficiency, national responsiveness, and worldwide leveraging of innovations and learning."

"A company's ability to respond to the strategic task demands of today's international operating environment is constrained by its internal capabilities, which are shaped by the company's administrative heritage."

"We observed three very different organizational models, each characterized by distinct structural configurations, administrative processes, and management mentalities."

"Redefinition of the issues allows managers of the transnational company to develop a broader perspective and leads to very different criteria for making choices."

"The most crucial task of transnational managers is to encourage a shared vision and personal commitment to integrate the organization at the fundamental level of individual members."

"Elements of a company's administrative heritage must be considered on equal terms with the economic, political, and other external pressures in decisions on configuration."

"Today's worldwide competitive environment demands collaborative information sharing and problem solving, cooperative resource sharing, and collective implementation."

"The national subsidiaries become strategic partners whose knowledge and capabilities are vital to the corporation's ability to maintain a long-term global competitive advantage."

"In the current international environment, a company's ability to innovate is rapidly becoming the primary source of competitive success."

"In many companies the development of transnational strategic capabilities is impeded by the ingrained power of the organization's dominant management group."

"Structural change is a blunt instrument that can have devastating effects on established organizational processes and managers' motivations if used improperly."

"The transnational must be able to reconcile the diversity of perspectives and interests it deliberately fosters."

"Top management can develop a managerial mentality throughout the company that co-opts individual employees into sharing the corporate vision rather than subjugates them in a little-understood organizational system."

"The key to converting the broad vision into action lies in the manager's understanding and acceptance of the logic and importance of the objectives."

"Companies can no longer delegate the complex issues relating to foreign markets, overseas sourcing, or global technologies to a specialized group of "internationalists.""

"By institutionalizing managers' participation in the deliberations leading to major choices, companies found they could greatly increase managers' personal commitment to the firm."

"There is no such thing as a universal global manager."

"Management of the successful companies recognized that transformation is as much a function of the behaviors of individuals within the organization as it is of the strategies, structures, and systems that top management controls"

"The interests of partners tend to diverge over time, and capabilities that once were well balanced and complementary can quickly become one-sided and threatening."