Essay about Christopher A. Bartlett, Sumantra Ghoshal: 'Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution'

Essay from the year 2003 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: Excellent (Grade A), University of Jyväskylä (School of Business and Economics; Department of Management and Leadership), course: Competitive Strategies, language: English, abstract: The book 'Managing Across Borders, The Transnational Solution' by Christopher A. Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal is about the challenges of international business particularly in 1980s. The authors divided the book in three main parts. The first part, called 'The Transnational Challenge', deals mainly with conceptual issues like the definition of multinational, global and international companies as well as structural fit and administrative heritage. Accordingly this chapter of the book tries to answer the question 'why' nowadays transnational organisations are needed. The second part, called 'Characteristics Of The Transnational', describes mainly the three key attributes of the transnational organisation. Which are the integrated network configuration of assets and activities, flexibility due to specialised roles and responsibilities and last but not least the facilitation of learning due to multiple innovation processes. Therefore this part of the book considers the question 'what' is the transnational organisation. The third part of the book, called 'Building And Managing The Transnational' prescribes mainly what managers have to do in order to build and manage an organisation that corresponds to the model of the transnational organisation. This means that, this chapter tries to answer the question 'how' can a transnational organisation be build. Not to mention there is a fourth part in the studied book, called 'Appendix: Research Methology' in with the authors describe their method of research and data collection more detailed than within the first three parts of the book. Succeeding I am going to summarise the content of each part more detailed.