K a trin G la tz e l E d ito ria l

What you are talking about is a management model that
is based more on personal contacts and relationships. In
fact, if you look back at the foundation of companies like
Philips and Unilever that were in our core sample, it was
the Philips brothers, and Lord Lever, who set up their glob-
al operations in ways that sound like the family companies
that you are talking about, where they would send
a trusted family member overseas, or an individual that
they knew very well. Essentially, the coordination was
done as much through trust and informal contacts as it
was through formal systems. We term this coordination
through socialization, which is an informal network of
trust and so on. That has remained an important part of
coordinating worldwide operations.
But once companies get to the size and complexity that
most of the public companies have, you need to develop a
wider portfolio of coordinating mechanisms because, as
you move more towards a transnational, network-based
organization, the coordination of flows of goods, resources,
and knowledge requires different kinds of coordination. On
top of coordination through socialization you need to
overlay formalization, which is a system of processes that
is often very good for coordinating flows of products (or
materials, finished goods, etc.) around the world. Finally,
there are some things that management just may need to
keep close to the center, particularly everything that is related
to scarce financial and human resources. These often
require coordination through centralization.
To look at it from a different perspective: capital markets
seem to become stronger and stronger in influencing major
management decisions, calling for short-term interest,
strong top-down management control, and so forth. Would
you agree?
Multinationals can source financial resources from all over
the world. If the Brazilian government offers them incentive
to go on and set up a plant there that gives them a
lower cost of capital and lower global costs for a research
center or whatever, then there is incentive to do that because
it makes them more competitive. But in »The Individualized
Corporation« 3 Sumantra and I argued that for
most companies, the scarce, constraining resource is no
longer financial capital. Most companies historically have
had more financial capital than they had great ideas to
fund. What is the scarce and therefore strategic resource
in this information-based, knowledge-intensive, and service-driven
era, is intellectual human capital. Now the bat-
tle is really on for how companies develop and reward the
scarce resource of human capital. Companies are strug-
gling with that right now and will continue to do so, in-
cluding transnational companies.
Referring to the actual worldwide financial crisis, do you
think that multinational companies are part of the problems
that caused this crisis? And how will the crisis in turn
affect multinational companies?
I think the cause of the current crisis is pretty clear. It was
overleveraging of financial assets in the United States,
packaging them in poorly understood financial instruments,
then selling these toxic assets around the world.
This process led to the global cross-infection of markets.
There were multiple contributors to the crisis – poorly
designed financial instruments, the culture of greed, the
lack of regulation – a whole lot of things that have been
widely discussed in the press. But I wouldn’t put multinationals
at the center of the crisis.
........
I think that the nature of the corporation
will be challenged. …
The whole financial model of the
corporate world will be reassessed
and with it the evaluation of risk.
Having said that, I think there are some issues that are
very important to talk about. As we reassess a lot of the
assumptions about our capital markets, and indeed about
our global business markets, I think that the nature of the
corporation will be challenged. A lot of companies gained
competitiveness by overleveraging, whether they were
multinational or national. The whole financial model of
the corporate world will be reassessed and with it the evaluation
of risk. It will be forced on it both by governments
and by investors who will be a lot more conservative.
2 »Nemawashi« (»die Wurzeln bündeln«) oder »Ringi« bezeichnen
in Japan verbreitete, informelle Arten der Entscheidungsfindung,
bei denen in einem zeitintensiven, systematischen und zielge-
richteten Prozess die Zustimmung aller relevanten Mitarbeiter
eingeholt wird. Diese Form der Entscheidungsfindung steht damit
mitunter im Gegensatz zu einer stärker hierarchischen, Top
Management orientierten Entscheidungsfindung in westlichen
Unternehmen.
3 Ghoshal, S./Bartlett, Christopher A. (1999): The Individualized
Corporation: A Fundamentally New Approach to Management.
London: William Heinemann.
Christopher A. Bartlett im Interview 35 Revue für postheroisches Management / Heft 5