AN ASSIGNMENT

ON

ASIAN MANAGEMENT THINKER

PREPARED BY :- SUBMITTED TO:- RAVAL CHANDRASHEKHAR R DR. RAJESH BHATT

CONTENT

1. BIOGRAPHY

2. EARLY WORK AND CONTRIBUTION TO FIELD

3. LEARNING

4. BOOKS

5. ARTICLES

6. REFERENCES

BIOGRAPHY:-

BornSeptember 26, 1948Kolkata, India

DiedMarch 3, 2004Hampstead, United Kingdom

Nationality IndianFields Management

Alma mater

Harvard Business SchoolMIT Sloan School of ManagementIndian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management

Sumantra Ghoshal was born in Kolkata in 1948. After a Bsc in physics at Delhi University and a period at Indian Oil, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 1981

Ghoshal graduated from Delhi University with Physics major and at the Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management and worked for Indian Oil Corporation, rising through the management ranks before moving to the United States on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1981.

Sumantra Ghoshal was the founding Dean of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, which is jointly sponsored by the Kellogg School at Northwestern University and the London Business School..

Ghoshal was awarded an S.M. and a Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1983 and 1985 respectively, and was also awarded a D.B.A. degree from Harvard Business School in 1986. In 1985, he joined INSEAD Business School in France and wrote a stream of influential articles and books.

In 1994, he joined the London Business School. Ghoshal was a Fellow of the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM) in the U.K and a Professor of Strategic and International Management at the London Business School. He served as a member of The Committee of Overseers of the Harvard Business School..

Ghoshal’s research focuses on strategic, organizational and managerial issues confronting large, global.

SUMANTRA GHOSAL’S EARLY WORK AND CONTRIBUTION TO THE MANAGEMENT FIELD:-

Ghoshal's early work focused on the matrix structure in multinational organizations, and the "conflict and confusion" that reporting along both geographical and functional lines created. His later work is more ambitious, and hence perhaps more important - the idea that it is necessary to halt economics from taking over management. This, he theorised, is important since firms do not play on the periphery of human life today, but have taken a central role.

His treatment of management issues at the level of the individual led him to conclude that management theory that focuses on the economic aspects of man to the exclusion of all others is incorrect at best. According to him, "A theory that assumes that managers cannot be relied upon by shareholders can make managers less reliable."

Such theory, he warned, would become a self-fulfilling prophecy, a particularly stinging critique of the output of a majority of his colleagues in Business Schools that made him controversial. To his death, his fight was against the "narrow idea" that led to today's management theory being "undersocialised and one-dimensional, a parody of the human condition more appropriate to a prison or a madhouse than an institution which should be a force for good."

In co-operation with Christopher Bartlett, Ghoshal researched successful enterprises on international markets. They found three types of internationalization, differing in structural approach and strategic capabilities. The types were dubbed Multinational, Global and International.

Ghosal categorizing existing firms into three forms: companies

I. The multinational or multi-domestic enterprise, as exemplified by Unilever or Philips, whose strength lies in a high degree of local responsiveness. It is a decentralized federation of local firms linked together by a web of personal controls (expatriates from the home country firm occupying key positions abroad)

II. The global enterprise, such as Ford and Matsushita, whose strengths are scale efficiencies and cost advantages. Global scale facilities, often centralized in the home country, produce standardized products, while overseas operations are considered as delivery pipelines to tap into global market opportunities. There is tight control of strategic decisions, resources and information by the global hub

III. The international enterprise whose strength is its ability to transfer knowledge and expertise to less advanced overseas environments. It is a coordinated federation of local firms, controlled by sophisticated management systems and corporate staff. The attitude of the parent company tends to be parochial, fostered by the superior know-how at the center.

Multinational Enterprise

Global EnterpriseInternational

Enterprise

Strategic competency

responsiveness efficiency transfer of learning

Structures

lose federations of enterprises; national subsidiaries solve all operative tasks and some strategical.

tightly centralized enterprise; national subsidiaries primarily seen as distribution centres; all strategic and many operative decisions centralized

Somewhere in between multinational and global enterprises; some strategic areas centralized, some decentralized

Samples Unilever , ITT Exxon , Toyota IBM , Ericsson

Due to an ever faster changing environment, Bartlett and Ghoshal see a further need for adaptation with a drive toward a company, that masters not one, but all three of the strategic capabilities of the named types. The ideal-type thus created, they dubbed the transnational enterprise.

THEORY ABOUT MATRIX MANAGEMENT:-

As companies struggled with these changing environmental realities, many fell into one of two traps—one strategic, one structural.

The strategic trap was to implement simple, static solutions to complex and dynamic problems. The bait was often a consultant’s siren song promising to simplify or at least minimize complexity and discontinuity. Despite the new demands of overlapping industry boundaries and greatly altered value-added chains, managers were promised success if they would “stick to their knitting.” In a swiftly changing international political economy, they were urged to rein in dispersed overseas operations and focus on the triad markets, and in an increasingly intricate and sophisticated competitive environment, they were encouraged to choose between alternative generic strategies—low cost or differentiation.

Yet the strategic reality for most companies was that both their business and their environment really were more complex, while the proposed solutions were often simple, even simplistic. The traditional telephone company that stuck to its knitting was trampled by competitors who redefined their strategies in response to new technologies linking telecommunications, computers, and office equipment into a single integrated system.

The packaged-goods company that concentrated on the triad markets quickly discovered that Europe, Japan, and the United States were the epicenters of global competitive activity, with higher risks and slimmer profits than more protected and less competitive markets such as Australia, Turkey, and Brazil.

The consumer electronics company that adopted an either-or generic strategy found itself facing competitors able to develop cost and differentiation capabilities at the same time.

In recent years, as more and more managers recognized oversimplification as a strategic trap, they began to accept the need to manage complexity rather than seek to minimize it.

This realization, however, led many into an equally threatening organizational trap when they concluded that the best response to increasingly complex strategic requirements was increasingly complex organizational structures.

The obvious organizational solution to strategies that required multiple, simultaneous management capabilities was the matrix structure that became so fashionable in the late 1970s and the early 1980s.

Its parallel reporting relation-ships acknowledged the diverse, conflicting needs of functional, product, and geographic management groups and provided a formal mechanism for resolving them. Its multiple information channels allowed the organization to capture and analyze external complexity. And its overlapping responsibilities were designed to combat parochialism and build flexibility into the company’s response to change.

In practice, however, the matrix proved all but unmanageable—especially in an international context.

Dual reporting led to conflict and confusion; the proliferation of channels created informational logjams as a proliferation of committees and reports bogged down the organization; and overlapping responsibilities produced turf battles and a loss of accountability. Separated by barriers of distance, language, time, and culture, managers found it virtually impossible to clarify the confusion and resolve the conflicts.

In hindsight, the strategic and structural traps seem simple enough to avoid, so one has to wonder why so many experienced general managers have fallen into them. Much of the answer lies in the way we have traditionally thought about the general manager’s role.

As the competitive climate grows less stable and less predictable, it is harder for one person alone to succeed in that great visionary role. Similarly, as formal, hierarchical structure gives way to networks of personal relationships that work through informal, horizontal communication channels, the image of top management in an isolated corner office moving boxes and lines on an organization chart becomes increasingly anachronistic.

Top-level managers in many of today’s leading corporations are losing control of their companies.

The problem is not that they have misjudged the demands created by an increasingly complex environment and an accelerating rate of environmental change, nor even that they have failed to develop strategies appropriate to the new challenges.

The problem is that their companies are organizationally incapable of carrying out the sophisticated strategies they have developed.

Over the past 20 years, strategic thinking has far outdistanced organizational capabilities.

The strategic trap was to implement simple, static solutions to complex and dynamic problems. The bait was often a consultant’s siren song promising to simplify or at least minimize complexity and discontinuity.

The obvious organizational solution to strategies that required multiple, simultaneous management capabilities was the matrix structure that became so fashionable in the late 1970s and the early 1980s.

Its parallel reporting relation-ships acknowledged the diverse, conflicting needs of functional, product, and geographic management groups and provided a formal mechanism for resolving them.

Its multiple information channels allowed the organization to capture and analyze external complexity. And its overlapping responsibilities were designed to combat parochialism and build flexibility into the company’s response to change

LEARNING:-

While Managing Across Borders focused on broader issues facing the MNCs, The Individualized Corporation stressed the importance of human issues in companies.

In Managing Radical Change, Ghoshal studied the critical elements required by organizations to achieve major improvements in their performance as well as adapt themselves to the rapidly changing business environment

His original thinking in management disciplines, such as corporate strategy and globalization, made him one of the most popular figures in global business and the academic community, which witnessed the arrival and quick departure of several management thinkers.

Using a Purpose – People – Process model, Ghoshal urges firms to develop self-renewal abilities. “You cannot renew a company without revitalizing its people. Yet you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. But what you can do, is to change the smell of the place.” Adults don’t change basic attitudes unless they en-counter personal tragedy. Events at work rarely make such an impact. To revitalize people, companies must change the context of what they create around people.

Successful enterprises often overlook the need to revitalize. “Satisfactory under-performance is a far greater problem than a crisis,” he says . .

BOOKS :-

Sumantra Ghoshal published 10 books..

The Differential Network: Organizing the Multinational Corporation for Value Creation, a book he co-authored with Nitin Nohria, won the George Terry Book Award in 1997.

The Individualized Corporation:A Fundamentally New Approach to Management, co-authored with Christopher Bartlett, won the Igor Ansoff Award in 1997, and has been translated into seven languages.

Managing Radical Change, won the Management Book of the Year award in India. He was described by The Economist as 'Euroguru'.

Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution, a book he co-authored with Christopher Bartlett, has been listed in the Financial Times as one of the 50 most influential management books and has been translated into nine languages.

The Strategy Process: Concepts, Contexts, Cases : Global by Henry Mintzberg, Joseph Lampel, James Brian Quinn, and Sumantra Ghoshal, 2002.

The Differentiated Network : Organizing Multinational Corporations for Value Creation (The Jossey-Bass Business & Management Series) by Nitin Nohria and Sumantra Ghoshal .

Sumantra Ghoshal on Management : A Force for Good by Julian Birkinshaw and Gita Piramal.

ARTICLES:-

"Beyond Self-Interest Revisited" by Hector Rocha and Sumantra Ghoshal, Journal of Management Studies, 2006 Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 585-619

"Bad Management Theories are Destroying Good Management Practices" by Sumantra Ghoshal, Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2005 Vol. 4 Issue 1, pp.75-91

"Unleashing Organisational Energy" by Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal, MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 2003 Vol. 45, No. 1, pp. 45–51

"What is a Global Manager" by Christoper A. Barlett and Sumantra Ghoshal, Harvard Business Review, 2003 Aug;81(8):101-108, 141

"Managing Personal Human Capital" by Lynda Gratton and Sumantra Ghoshal, European Management Journal, 2003 vo. 21, No. 1, pp. 1-10

"Beware the Busy Manager" by Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal, Harvard Business Review, 2002, vol. 80, No. 2, pp. 62-69

"Strategy as a Guided Evolution" by Bjorn Lovas and Sumantra Ghoshal, Strategic Management Journal, 2000, vol. 21, No. 9, pp. 875-896

"Management Competence, Firm Growth and Economic Progress" by Sumantra Ghoshal, M Hahn and Peter Moran, Contributions to Political Economy, Vol. 18, pp. 121-150, 1999

"Markets, Firms, and the Process of Economic Development" by Peter Moran and Sumantra Ghoshal, The Academy of Management Review, 1999, Vol. 24, No. 3, 390-412

"Social Capital and Value Creation: The Role of Intrafirm Networks" by Wenpin Tsai and Sumantra Ghoshal, The Academy of Management Journal, 1998 Vol. 41, No. 4, pp. 464-476

"Social capital, intellectual capital and the organizational advantage" by Janine Nahapiet and Sumantra Ghoshal, Academy of Management Review, 1998 23(2): 242-266

"Theories of Economic Organisation: The Case for Realism and Balance" by Peter Moran and Sumantra Ghoshal, The Academy of Management Review, 1996, Vol. 21 No. 1, pp. 58-72

"Bad For Practice: A Critique of the Transaction Cost Theory" by Sumantra Ghoshal and Peter Moran, The Academy of Management Review, 1996 Vol. 21, No. 1, pp.13-47

"Building the Entrepreneurial Corporation: New Organisational Processes, New Managerial Tasks" by Sumantra Ghoshal and Christopher A. Barlett, European Management Journal, 1995 Vol. 13 No.2, pp.139-55

"Differentiated Fit and Shared Values: Alternatives for Managing Headquarters-Subsidiary Relations" by Nitin Nohria and Sumantra Ghoshal, Strategic Management Journal, 1994, Vol. 15, No. 6, pp. 491-502

"Interunit Communication in Multinational Corporations" by Sumantra Ghoshal, Harry Korine and Gabriel Szulanski, Management Science, Vol. 40, No. 1, January 1994, pp. 96-110

"Beyond the M-form: Toward a Managerial Theory of the Firm" by Christopher A. Barlett and Sumantra Ghoshal, Strategic Management Journal, 1993 No. 14, Winter, pp. 23-46

"Matrix Management: Not a Structure, a Frame of Mind" by Christopher A. Barlett and Sumantra Ghoshal, Harvard Business Review, 1990 Jul-Aug; 68(4): 138-145

"Environmental Scanning in Korean Firms: Organisational Isomorphism in Action" by Sumantra Ghoshal, Journal of International Business Studies, 1988 Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 69-86

"Creation, Adoption, and Diffusion of Innovations by Subsidiaries of Multinational Corporations" by Sumantra Ghoshal and Christopher A. Barlett, Journal of International Business Studies, 1988 Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 365-388

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