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What Is a Global Manager

In: Business and Management

Submitted By termmmm
Words 2643
Pages 11
The answer is a network of specialists, not a

individual.

What is a Globai iVianager?

by Christopher A. Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal
In the early stages of its drive overseas. Corning
Glass hired an American ex-ambassador to head up its international division. He had excellent contacts in the governments of many nations and could converse in several languages, hut he was less familiar with Corning and its businesses. In contrast, ITT decided to set up a massive educational program to "globalize" all managers responsible for its worldwide telecommunications husiness-in essence, to replace its national specialists with global generalists.
Corning and ITT eventually realized they had taken wrong turns. Like many other companies organizing for worldwide operations in recent years, they found that an elite of ¡et-setters was often difficult to integrate into the corporate mainstream; nor did they need an international team of big-picture overseers to tbe exclusion of focused experts.
Success in today's international climate-a far cry from only a decade ago-demands highly specialized yet closely linked groups of global business managers, country or regional managers, and worldwide functional managers. This kind of organization characterizes a transnational rather than an old-line multinational, international, or global company. Transnational integrate assets, resources.
124

and diverse people in operating units around the world. Through a flexible management process, in which business, country, and functional managers form a triad of different perspectives that balance one another, transnational companies can build three strategic capabilities;
• global-scale efficiency and competitiveness; n national-level responsiveness and flexibility; and
• cross-market capacity to leverage learning on a worldwide basis.
While traditional

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