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...

Large, diversified companies which flourised in the early decades following the Second World War are in deep trouble. The organizational structure of this period which provided the elixir -- the multidivisional enterprise -- has proved incapable of meeting the changed world environment and the...

The relationship between individual employees and their employing organizations is undergoing fundamental changes. Increasingly, the employee is less a malleable resource for the company and more a mobile investor of his or her own human capital. Defining human capital as the composite of an...

The relationship between organizational slack and innovation has remained an unanswered empirical question for decades and theorists continue to argue over the basic issue of whether slack facilitates or inhibits innovation. Opponents of slack claim that slack relaxes incentives to innovate and...