Christopher A. Bartlett

Global Competitive Pressures and Host Country Demands: Managing Tensions in MNCs

Much has been written about the growing complexity of strategic demands facing multinational corporations. The authors examine conflicts implicit in the recent development of several such demands, and look at some of their administrative and organizational implications. In illustrating the administrative adaptations made by several companies, the authors highlight the need for change on a broader basis than the continual reorganizations resorted to by many MNCs.

Building the entrepreneurial corporation: New organizational processes, new managerial tasks

Large, diversified companies which flourised in the early decades following the Second World War are in deep trouble. The organizational structure of this period which provided the elixir -- the multidivisional enterprise -- has proved incapable of meeting the changed world environment and the new demands of the 1990s. In a word, these companies have become fossilized and unable to adapt to the slower growth, instability and capital plenty that characterizes the present day. Even harsh cost-reduction programs have only given short-term relief. Sumantra Ghoshal and Christopher Bartlett point to the example of a few successful companies like GE, ABB and Toyota, that have broken the mold and, as well, rejected the principles of the multidivisional doctrine. The companies employ an emerging management model which the authors argue is not a new organizational structure, but a new set of key management processes, as well as new roles and tasks of managers at different levels needed to carry out these processes. The core processes are: entrepreneurial (encouraging initiatives); integrative (linking and leveraging competence); and renewal (managing rationalization and revitalization). Each process needs a new management mindset to carry it out. Ghoshal and Bartletts original contribution is to set these core processes and their management in a broadly-based and integrated theory which can be applied in practice. The essential task is to build up these new management roles.

The Transnational and Beyond: Reflections and Perspectives at the Millennium

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.