People are innately curious and, as social animals, are naturally motivated to interact and learn from one another. Over thousands of years, families, clans, and communities have evolved as teaching and learning groups, with individuals sharing information and synthesizing knowledge as a central...

This paper reports some of the findings of a study on environmental scanning practices in six large Korean firms and compares the results with those of previous studies on scanning conducted in the United States. Such comparisons are made for both the scanning behaviors of individual managers...

This paper reports some of the findings of a multi-phased, multi-method study on the organizational attributes that facilitate creation, adoption, and diffusion of innovations by subsidiaries of multinational companies. Comparison of results obtained through case research in nine companies,...

In this paper we investigate some of the organizational factors that influence subsidiary-headquarters and intersubsidiary communication in multinational companies. Our study is based on data collected from 164 senior managers working in 14 different national subsidiaries within the consumer...

Under the careful direction of its President, Dr Yoshio Maruta, the Kao Corporation of Japan had become pre-eminently a 'learning organisation' since the 1970s. But could it transfer its learning capability and domestic market success to the US and Europe? Sumantra Ghoshal and Charlotte Butler...

The story of the acquisition of Zanussi by Electrolux, a process begun in 1983, is a classic success one involving an aggressively acquisitive company growing strategically in a difficult industry. Although Zanussi was not targetted, the troubled Italian producer was a very good fit for the...

Sumantra Ghoshal discusses the main features of his and Christopher Bartlett's new book, The Individualized Corporation, leading on to some of his current thinking on management issues in multinational corporations. Much of the book is devoted to describing the new corporate model, and to...