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Executive Overview Among the myths about global strategy is the assumption that it means integration across international operations that causes a loss of country identity and dissociation of product lines from their local context, as they report to global product managers. This article advances a different view, in which global strategy is synonymous with holistic approaches, necessarily international ones, that can tighten local integration in the interest of global goals. The experience of Gillette after the acquisition of Parker Pen shows that mergers and acquisitions by global companies can involve local integration across divisions in order to create within-country synergies. It also shows that tapping the power of global brands often requires acknowledging country differences and respecting local norms, thus strengthening, rather than weakening, the local country unit and enhancing relationships across functions and divisions within it.

This article comments on a paper by Sumantra Ghoshal published in this issue of Academy of Management Learning & Education which argues that academic research related to the conduct of business and...

Argues that, although cultural differences clearly affect relationships within organizations, tensions are often triggered first by other contextual factors. Presents the findings of a study of foreign acquisitions of US firms, and demonstrates how problems between the two partners most often arise out of strategic, organizational, political and financial issues. Describes the factors which determine the success of mergers between partners where different cultural values are involved.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter's views on change and organizations have had great influence on corporate thinking in recent years. She has expressed her ideas directly to companies and in many journal articles and books, the best-known of which are The Change Masters, When Giants learn to Dance and more recently. The Challenge of Organizational Change. In an interview at Harvard Business School with European Management Journal's editor, Paul Stonham, she makes her next major statement since Challenge of Organizational Change. She holds that the nature of the global economy far transcends just the existence of the multinational or transnational corporation. Globalization, and the development of cross-border ties by companies can affect even local businesses. This argument leans on many fields of analysis, sociological, historical and political, among others. For example, one of the major challenges facing business people today is the tension between the globalizing power of business and the localizing power of politics. Kanter gives examples of successful companies which have paid greater heed to what used to be considered external forces, and have consequently managed change better. She also looks at the careers of CEOs and senior executives in companies introducing new strategies and change processes, as well as at new management styles, and makes prescriptions for managers to meet the pressures of stress and turmoil. She explains that her interest in globalization extends beyond its effects on organizational behavior to strategy and the new partnership networks and relationships that companies are engaging in as a result of globalization. These relationships are a key asset in companies' global operations. Supplier—customer relations and partnerships are growing especially rapidly in power and importance. Cultural factors should be treated very carefully as explanations of global competitive advantage — business itself is breaking down borders. Finally, Kanter predicts that businesses which are only locally focused and do not know how to build global partnerships and relationships will lose out. Business is in a phase of massive change — just restructuring is not sufficient. Walls are being torn down and bridges must be built.

Zoom buttons on digital devices let us examine images from many viewpoints. They also provide an apt metaphor for modes of strategic thinking. Some people prefer to see things up close, others from afar. Both perspectives have virtues. But they should not be fixed positions, says Harvard Business School's Kanter. To get a complete picture, leaders need to zoom in and zoom out. A close-in perspective is often found in relationship-intensive settings. It brings details into sharp focus and makes opportunities look large and compelling. But it can have significant downsides. Leaders who prefer to zoom in tend to create policies and systems that depend too much on politics and favors. They can focus too closely on personal status and on turf protection. And they often miss the big picture. When leaders zoom out, they can see events in context and as examples of general trends. They are able to make decisions based on principles. Yet a far-out perspective also has traps. Leaders can be so high above the fray that they don't recognize emerging threats. Having zoomed out to examine all possible routes, they may fail to notice when the moment is right for action on one path. They may also seem too remote and aloof to their staffs. The best leaders can zoom in to examine problems and then zoom out to look for patterns and causes. They don't divide the world into extremes-idiosyncratic or structural, situational or strategic, emotional or contextual. The point is not to choose one over the other but to learn to move across a continuum of perspectives.

Executive Overview After reading in this issue of AME “Hubble error: Time, money and millionths of an inch,” we expected that many readers would want to try to understand what happened and why. Anticipating this reaction, we asked prominent management scholars and consultants for their comments. What follows is a first installment. Editor

What are the big business ideas that will shape tomorrow's agenda? In every issue of business strategy review we provide an update on what some of the world's leading thinkers are currently working on.

Large corporations have long been seen as lumbering, inflexible, bureaucratic--and clueless about global developments. But recently some multinationals seem to be transforming themselves: They're engaging employees, moving quickly, and introducing innovations that show true connection with the world. Harvard Business School's Kanter ventured with a research team inside a dozen global giants--including IBM, ProcterGamble, Omron, CEMEX, Cisco, and Banco Real--to discover what has been driving the change. After conducting more than 350 interviews on five continents, she and her colleagues came away with a strong sense that we are witnessing the dawn of a new model of corporate power: The coordination of actions and decisions on the front lines now appears to stem from widely shared values and a sturdy platform of common processes and technology, not from top-down decrees. In particular, the values that engage the passions of far-flung workforces stress openness, inclusion, and making the world a better place. Through this shift in what might be called their guidance systems, the companies have become as creative and nimble as much smaller ones, even while taking on social and environmental challenges of a scale that only large enterprises could attempt. IBM, for instance, has created a nonprofit partnership, World Community Grid, through which any organization or individual can donate unused computing power to research projects and see what is being done with the donation in real time. IBM has gained an inspiring showcase for its new technology, helped business partners connect with the company in a positive way, and offered individuals all over the globe the chance to contribute to something big.

Never a fad, but always in or out of fashion, innovation gets rediscovered as a growth enabler every half dozen years. Too often, though, grand declarations about innovation are followed by mediocre execution that produces anemic results, and innovation groups are quietly disbanded in cost-cutting drives. Each managerial generation embarks on the same enthusiastic quest for the next new thing. And each generation faces the same vexing challenges- most of which stem from the tensions between protecting existing revenue streams critical to current success and supporting new concepts that may be crucial to future success. In this article, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter reflects on the four major waves of innovation enthusiasm she's observed over the past 25 years. She describes the classic mistakes companies make in innovation strategy, process, structure, and skills assessment, illustrating her points with a plethora of real-world examples--including ATT Worldnet, Timberland, and Ocean Spray. A typical strategic blunder is when managers set their hurdles too high or limit the scope of their innovation efforts. Quaker Oats, for instance, was so busy in the 1990s making minor tweaks to its product formulas that it missed larger opportunities in distribution. A common process mistake is when managers strangle innovation efforts with the same rigid planning, budgeting, and reviewing approaches they use in their existing businesses--thereby discouraging people from adapting as circumstances warrant. Companies must be careful how they structure fledgling entities alongside existing ones, Kanter says, to avoid a clash of cultures and agendas--which Arrow Electronics experienced in its attempts to create an online venture. Finally, companies commonly undervalue and underinvest in the human side of innovation--for instance, promoting individuals out of innovation teams long before their efforts can pay off. Kanter offers practical advice for avoiding these traps.

More and more small and midsize companies are joining corporate giants in striving to exploit international growth markets. At the same time, civic leaders worry about their communities' economic future in light of the impact of global forces on the operation and survival of business. How can communities retain local vitality yet still link their business to the global economy? Harvard professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter addresses that question in this classic HBR article, orginally published in 1995. To avoid a clash between international economic interests and local political interests, globalizing business must learn how to be responsive to the communities in which they operate, Kanter says. And communities must determine how to create a civic culture that will attract and retain footloose companies. The author surveyed five U.S. regions with direct connections to the global economy--Boston, Cleveland, Miami, Seattle, and the Spartanburg-Greenville region of South Carolina--to determine their business and civic leader's strategies for improving their constituent's quality of life. She identified ways in which the global economy can work locally by capitalizing on the resources that distinguish one place from another. Kanter argues that regions can invest in capabilities that connect their local populations to the global economy in one of three ways: as thinkers, makers, or traders. She points to the Spartanburg-Greenville region as a good example of a world-class makers, with its exceptional blue-collar workforce that has attracted more than 200 companies from 18 countries. The history of the economic development of this region is a lesson for those seeking to understand how to achieve world-class status and bring local residents into the world economy.

Though Mary Parker Follett died in 1933, her philosophy of business organization and management is echoed in companies today where quality circles employee empowerment, and more horizontal organizational structures built on networks and relationships have been adopted with impressive results. Ahead of her time in the 1920s and 1930s, Follett was a political scientist, social work pioneer, speaker, and advisor to leaders concerned with labor-management relations on both sides of the Atlantic. Her advocacy of conflict as a constructive and creative means of problem solving and her general criticism of strict hierarchical structures in business organizations ran counter to the administrative dictates of the post-World War II era. Accordingly, her insights were neglected in the years following her death, and much of her work fell out of print. In Mary Parker Follett - Prophet of Management, editor Pauline Graham presents a selection of Follett's remarkable writings, culled from all her work, including her lectures. These, delivered between 1925 and 1933, provide a fascinating perspective on critical management topics that have continued relevance for managers today: conflict, power, authority, leadership, control, the role of the individual in the group, and the place of business in society. This collection brings together an eminent group of management experts from four continents and two generations who celebrate their own good fortune in having encountered Mary Parker Follett in the decades when her work was uncovered primarily through library research. Commentaries by Warren Bennis, John Child, Angela Dumas, Tokihiko Enomoto, Henry Mintzberg, Nitin Nohria, and Sir Peter Parker accompanyFollett's own words. Their reflections underscore the contemporary significance of Follett's ideas and testify to the excitement of discovering eloquence and truth in the observations of a brilliant thinker who continues to lead the way in her espousal of business as a social in

In this book, the authors present case studies of organizational change at leading companies. Essays by the authors introduce each section and look at the cases as instructive models for how to institute change in the corporation - or in some situations - how not to. In the first section, on "emergent change", studies of Apple Computer, Sears and Bendix, among others, illustrate environmental and cyclical change. The second section on "forced change" draws on the examples of Safeway, AT & T, the Western-Delta takeover, downsizing at Xerox and restructuring at Lucky Stores, to show how companies change under intense pressure. The third section, on "engineered" change, shows the effect of "changemasters" on the evolution of Kodak, British Air, and General Electric, and the role of unions at General Motors and Eastern Airlines. The book concludes with the prospects for the future of deliberate change.

(1981). Power, leadership, and participatory management. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 20, Leadership for the Twenty-first Century, pp. 219-224.

This paper makes the case for an absence of sex differences in work behavior, arguing instead that work attitudes and work behavior are a function of location in organizational structures. The structures of opportunity (e. g., mobility prospects) and power (e. g., influence upward), along with the proportional representation of a person's social type, define and shape the ways that organization members respond to their jobs and to each other. In hierarchical systems like large corporations, the relative disadvantage of many women with respect to opportunity and power results in behaviors and attitudes (such as limited aspirations, concern with co-worker friendships, or controlling leadership styles) that are also true of men in similarly disadvantaged positions. The structure of power in organizations, rather than inherent sexual attitudes, can also explain why women sometimes appear to be less preferred as leaders. It is concluded that it is not the nature of women but hierarchical arrangements that must be changed if we are to promote equity in the workplace. This paper proposes that structural conditions, particularly those stemming from the nature of hierarchy, shape apparent "sex differences" in the workplace and in organizations. Findings about behavior of and toward women in organizations can be explained by a number of structural variables that also can account for the behavior of and toward men in similar situations. This conclusion has been reached after field work in two corporations, interviews with "token" women in professional and management positions and secretaries and secretarial supervisors, and an extensive review of the social psychological and sociological literatures on work orientations and leadership behavior. Underlying this analysis is a conception of an organization as a total system. Occupations, work behavior, and work relations are too often studied as if they exist in a vacuum-each occupation or office or departmental unit considered as an isolated entity-and not within complex systems that define the position of interacting parties with respect to larger distributions of opportunity, power, and numerical ratios of social types. The hierarchical systems in which most work relations occur define which people are mobile, which will advance, which positions lead to other positions, and how many opportunities for growth and change occur along a particular chain of positions. Organizational systems also define a network of power relations outside of the authority vested in formal positions; the power network defines which people can be influential beyond the boundaries of their positions. Finally, the distribution of social types and social characteristics among personnel in different positions (and especially such ascribed characteristics as age, race, and sex) define whether people of a given type are relatively rare or relatively common.

There are two reasons that current corporate efforts to achieve employee "participation" often seem fragile and temporary: unrealistic expectations about the appropriate use of participation and a failure to manage participation efforts for maximum success. Participation is most appropriate when, for example, expertise is diffused, issues are controversial, problems cut across existing roles, or the development of people is desired; autonomy and individual responsibility may be more appropriate under the opposite conditions. Kanter discusses six sets of dilemmas that must be resolved to ensure that participating teams work effectively for the organization: dilemmas around initiation, structure, issue choice, teamwork, links between teams and their environment, and evaluation/continuation. Kanter concludes that participation works best when it is well managed. Participation is best viewed not as a permanent "program" or a "formula" but as temporary episodes of high involvement alternating with a more routine everyday structure.

Pressures to innovate confront businesses with a demanding balancing act. While caught up in the mainstream, they must also generate "newstreams." Particularly today, mainstream businesses can easily dry up, stagnate. Thus companies must explore opportunities to pioneer in new directions, seek innovations that will improve or even transform the mainstream. And in order to do this, they need to tap newstreams. Many companies are extending opportunities for invention well beyond the R&D department and opportunities for new venture development well beyond the acquisition specialists. Newstream programs bring together inventors and developers with investors and sponsors. This article examines eight different approaches to developing newstreams in eight companies and describes the challenges of newstream management.

Disciplinary boundaries are often drawn and maintained so that professional territory can be protected; this is a generally deplorable mode of scholarship. Yet, as I approached the problem of producing a commentary useful for social historians, I found myself asking the question: What is left for a sociologist to contribute as a sociologist? The historians represented in this volume (and the one sociologist, Furstenberg, who has temporarily joined them) show an appreciation for social theory, an ability to use sociological methods of both quantitative and qualitative analysis, and add to that their own competence in grounding their work in the particulars of time and place. So what is there left to do that is uniquely sociological? The answer lies, I propose, in the task of sytemization-identifying variables and issues that lend themselves to comparative analysis across times and places. Such variables can be used to examine the differing ways families interact with their social and economic context as we...

This paper is an attempt to review recent literature on traditional and contemporary life-styles in the light of the cultural differentiation of tastes and preferences. We start with the assumption that tastes are neither completely determined by economic status, as was implied by Marx, nor totally individualized. Tastes are determined in part by relative position in the markets for wealth and prestige, in part by individual choice informed by education and experience, and in part by voluntarily chosen, collectively held standards that determine life-styles. Life-style differentia­ tion takes place both inside and outside the markets for wealth and prestige and hence crosscuts them.l In this paper we discuss both c1assical life-styles generated by socioeconomic stratification and alternative life-styles generated as spontaneous attempts to reach consensus on standards of value in the absence of compelling traditional market constraints. Empirically, tastes are revealed in economic consumption patterns; political be­ liefs; and moral, ethical, and aesthetic standards. The collectively held standards that actually differentiate among life-styles vary from time to time and from place to place. In the past decade American society has witnessed a proliferation of alternative life-styles. Preferences for two-career families over one-career families, ethnic reidentification over assimilation, homosexual relationships over heterosex­ ual relationships, communal living over family living, and immediate gratification over deferred gratification, among many others, have been responsible for the emer­ gence of distinctive life"styles. Many ofthese may be of purely ethnographic interest, while others will probably have measurable effects on such economic and social indicators as energy consumption, purchase of housing and durable goods, fertility, saving and borrowing patterns, and marriage and divorce.