David J. Collis

Competing on Resources: Strategy in the 1990s

As recently as ten years ago, we thought we knew most of what we needed to know about strategy. Portfolio planning, the experience curve, PIMS, Porters five forces-tools like these brought rigor and legitimacy to strategy at both the business-unit and the corporate level. Leading companies, such as General Electric, built large staffs that reflected growing confidence in the value of strategic planning. Strategy consulting boutiques expanded rapidly and achieved widespread recognition. How different the landscape looks today. The armies of planners have all but disappeared, swept away by the turbulence of the past decade. On multiple fronts, strategy has come under fire.

The Corporate Headquarters in the Contemporary Corporation: Advancing a Multimarket Firm Perspective

AbstractThe corporate headquarters (CHQ) is the central organizational unit in the contemporary corporation and is critical for value creation in the overall firm. Since the early 1960s, a signific...

The strategic management of uncertainty

As the economic environment becomes increasingly uncertain, the ways firms minimize the risks of, and capitalize on the opportunities presented by that uncertainty become correspondingly important. This paper develops a strategic approach to the management of uncertainty which firms can use to achieve a desirable balance of risk and return. It identifies four generic approaches to uncertainty which differ in the pattern and timing of their resource commitments, and which firms can choose from to offset the exogenous uncertainty they face. The paper then suggests the conditions under which each approach might be appropriate, and describes the important managerial issues surrounding the different approaches. It thereby provides a way to integrate the treatment of uncertainty into strategy making at all levels of the organisation.

What Do We Know About Corporate Headquarters? A Review, Integration, and Research Agenda

During the past five decades, scholars have studied the corporate headquarters (CHQ) – the multidivisional firm’s central organizational unit. The purpose of this article is to review the diverse and fragmented literature on the CHQ and to identify the variables of interest, the dominant relationships, and the contributions. We integrate, for the first time, the existing knowledge of the CHQ into an organizing framework. Based on a synthesis of the literature, we identify major shortcomings and gaps, and present an agenda for future research that contributes to our understanding of the CHQ and the multidivisional firm.

International Differences in the Size and Roles of Corporate Headquarters: An Empirical Examination

This paper examines differences in the size and roles of corporate headquarters around the world. Based on a survey of over 600 multibusiness corporations in seven countries (France, Germany, Holland, UK, Japan, US, and Chile) the paper describes the differences among countries, and then applies a model of the factors determining the size of corporate headquarters (Young, Collis, and Goold, 2003) to systematically examine those differences. The data shows that there are significant differences among countries in the size and role of corporate headquarters, and strongly suggests the existence of a developing country model, a European model, a US model, and a Japanese model of corporate headquarters. Contrary to popular expectations, corporate headquarters in the US are about twice the size of European counterparts. Headquarters there exert a higher level of functional influence and have larger staffs in certain key areas, such as IT and R&D. US managers are generally more satisfied than their European counterparts with their larger more powerful headquarters which suggests that, at least in the US context, large corporate headquarters can create value. Japanese headquarters, as might have been expected, are substantially larger than elsewhere – a factor of four times larger than in Europe. However, those headquarters are becoming smaller because of dissatisfaction with their performance. It is clear that having headquarters the size of the Japanese firms in the survey is not conducive to value creation. More specifically, the evidence cannot refute a hypothesis that the slope of the relationship between firm size and the size of corporate headquarters is the same across all countries, but that there are significant differences in the intercept for Chile, the US, Japan, and the European countries. What the data indicates is that at a firm employing 20,000, a European corporate headquarters would on average employ 124 individuals, a US headquarters would have 255 employees, and Japan 467 employees. The paper also examines differences between countries in the extent to which they perform the two key corporate tasks of control and coordination. The US and Chile chose to be somewhat more interventionist in the traditional tools and processes used to monitor and control business units – setting strategy, budgets, and administering capital budgets. However, there was a significant difference in the degree of influence in operational affairs between countries. The US and Japan exerted far more influence than the other countries over every activity from IT and purchasing, to marketing, R&D and HR issues. The US was also found to have significantly larger legal, tax, and treasury functions than the common European model, perhaps reflecting a more legalistic institutional structure. Japan also has significantly larger tax, treasury, and corporate management functions, but overall was not that much larger than the common European model. While the causes of these observed differences cannot be directly determined from the research, suggestions are made that the institutional infrastructure, the size and homogeneity of the domestic market, and cultural factors within countries are important underlying drivers.

The Value of Breadth and the Importance of Differences

Abstract Pankaj Ghemawat is honored not only for the breadth of his contribution to International Management as a scholar but also as an educator and passionate advocate of his ideas to practitioners. His work extends from industrial organization applications within the traditional strategy field all the way to international business insights into global strategy. The methodologies he employs straddle theoretical models, field-based cases, and even the creation of original databases. This suggests that in the hands of a true intellectual, there is value to an eclectic approach in academia. This is particularly true since the key insight of Pankaj’s work is that differences among countries remain central to global strategy and that it is those differences that can be arbitraged into competitive advantage.