Sumantra Ghoshal on Management: A Force for Good

Chapter 2. Managing across borders: New strategic requirements

<authorgroup>Christopher A. Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal</authorgroup>

This paper and the next (Chapter 3) present the basic thesis of Chris Bartlett and Sumantra’s classic book Managing Across Borders. It describes the changing business environment facing multinational corporations in the late 1980s. Before then, most multinationals were competing in industries that operated according to a particular set of rules: global economies of scale in consumer electronics, local responsiveness in packaged goods, and worldwide knowledge-sharing in telecommunication equipment. But changing environmental conditions and increasing levels of competition meant that by the late 1980s it was not enough ...