MIT Sloan Management Review

GENERALS PLANNING military action and CEOs plotting corporate strategy often start from the same point: they identify the key strengths and weaknesses of their position vis-à-vis their rivals and develop a strategy to exploit the strengths and protect the weaknesses. In the corporate world many factors come into play, including quality of product, service, and [...]

IN A COMPANION ARTICLE (Summer 1987), we described how recent changes in the international operating environment have forced companies to optimize efficiency, responsiveness, and learning simultaneously in their worldwide operations. To companies that previously concentrated on developing and managing one of these capabilities, this new challenge implied not only a total strategic reorientation but a [...]

THE DEMANDS OF MANAGING in an international operating environment changed considerably over the past decade. In an increasing number of industries, the benefits of exploiting global economies of scale and scope enhanced the need for integration and coordination of activities. At the same time, volatile exchange rates, industrial policies of host governments, resistance of consumers [...]

Providing a detailed framework for evaluating whether — and how — to globalize an individual firm’s corporate strategy, the author outlines opportunities for gaining competitive advantage. He provides examples of companies that have exploited globalization drivers and strategy levers. He also discusses the relative merits of global and multidomestic strategies in various strategic situations.

It is hardly a novel insight that global competitive forces compel multinationals to fully leverage the distinctive resources, knowledge, and expertise residing in their subsidiary operations. Questions of what are “winning” global strategic moves for the modern multinational have increasingly intoxicated international executives.1 Yet for all the fanfare about global strategies and their increasingly undeniable [...]

The author presents strategies for negotiating with people from other cultures in a framework based on each party’s level of familiarity with the other’s culture and the extent to which they can explicitly coordinate their strategies. These factors determine the subset of strategies that are realistically feasible for an individual manager. Part 2 (HBSP product number xxxx) (Reprint 3537 in the Spring 1994 issue) describes a methodology for choosing among these strategies.

Many firms have responded to the globalization of business by developing international supply chains1 in which the various value-adding activities comprising a finished product are dispersed geographically in a number of countries.2 At the same time, many businesses have tried to understand and implement lean production systems, pioneeered by Toyota, that encompass goals such as [...]

The United States has become the most desirable location in the world to build cars. Despite the revival of the Big Three, new entries continually appear, with two European makers, BMW and Mercedes-Benz, setting up plants in the United States. At the same time, cracks are apparent in the vaunted Japanese manufacturing system. Exports to [...]

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. — French expression
They don’t make much money, but they sure make a lot of stuff. — Down East Maine expression
Rumors of my demise have been much exaggerated. —Mark Twain
After years of observing U.S. industry under siege from foreign competitors, U.S. managers, shareholders, and business journalists have changed [...]

Japanese subcontracting is complex and evolutionary, a result of the interplay of historical events and human agents. Consequently, no single theory —whether dualism, flexible specialization, transaction cost economics, or cultural specificity (which we discuss later) — is sufficient to explain it. In this paper, we detail the evolution of Japanese industrial sourcing and view subcontracting [...]