Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution By Sumanra Ghoshal

Managing Across Borders
Sumantra Ghoshal co-authored Managing across Borders: The Transnational Solution with Christopher A. Bartlett, This book has been listed in the Financial Times as one of the 50 most influential management books and has been translated into nine languages. It was a book that was widely acclaimed for developing insights on how to manage companies in an international environment. The basic crux of the book is the internationalization of business in the world of global competition. The authors argue that this global competition has changed the way how managers need to look at business; they feel managers have to re-evaluate the strategies that they have taken for a worldwide approach and organization capability development.
The first part looks at the changes in business environments that have forced the companies to adopt a transnational solution. Nine companies were used for the study for a transnational organization. At the start of the book itself the authors emphasize that this is no easy task as 2 of these companies shut the business they were studying while the rest 7 share one common characteristic that the top management the need to build and manage a different kind of organization. These organizations made strong and consistent efforts to develop the characteristics of a transnational company. The companies that were selected were from diverse industries, they included Unilever, Proctor & Gamble and Kao from FMCG, Matsushita, Philips and General Electric from consumer electronics and Ericsson, ITT and NEC from telecommunications. The selected companies were such that they were huge in size had significant growth in past years and had a global footprint. In the article the authors argue that the worldwide competition has made the business very complex. If one has to respond to this environment companies will have to develop global competitiveness, multinational flexibility and international knowledge transfer simultaneously. These abilities represent how well a company can compete on an international
As mentioned in the early chapters of the book the authors reinforce the fact that even though management might have recognized the need of a trans national operation it becomes very difficult even for international firms to come up with a transnational solution and even more difficult to implement and maintain them. The authors via use various examples give a practical solution on how to achieve the same. According to the authors the trick is not to create matrix structure that have become the current norm but to create matrix in the mind of the managers which in turn means that although the structure of the organization can be changed a lot and it is relatively easy to make these changes. These changes can only work if and only if the mentality of the people who work at this organization change. This change has to have a bottom up approach. The mentality and thinking of the individual has to be changed first, this would then facilitate the change in interpersonal relationships, communication flows and finally this all will lead to a better decision making process.
The central theme to this transnational solution is that enforcement of a particular structure won’t get you the desired results but what will help is the development of a managerial culture which promotes cooption. This will ensure that instead of creation of a completely new structure