Ask most managers what gets in the way of their success, and you'll hear the familiar litany of complaints: Not enough time. Limited resources. No clear sense of how their work fits into the grand corporate scheme. These are, for the most part, excuses. What really gets in the way of managers' success is fear of making their own decisions and acting accordingly. Managers must overcome the psychological desire to be indispensable. In this article, the authors demonstrate how managers can become more productive by learning to manage demands, generate resources, and recognize and exploit alternatives. To win the support they want, managers must develop a long-term strategy and pursue their goals slowly, steadily, and strategically. To expand the range of opportunities, for their companies and themselves, managers must scan the environment for possible obstacles and search for ways around them. Fully 90% of the executives the authors have studied over the past few years wasted their time and frittered away their productivity, despite having well-defined projects, goals, and the necessary knowledge to get their jobs done. Such managers remain trapped in inefficiency because they assume they do not have enough personal discretion or control. They forget how to take initiative-the most essential quality of any truly successful manager. Effective managers, by contrast, are purposeful corporate entrepreneurs who take charge of their jobs by developing trust in their own judgment and adopting long-term, big-picture views to fulfill personal goals that match those of the organization.

Driven by ideology, religion, and mistrust, the world seems more fragmented than at any time since, arguably, World War II. But however deep the political divisions, business operations continue to span the globe, and executives still have to figure out how to run them efficiently and well. In "What Is a Global Manager?" (first published in September/October 1992), business professors Christopher Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal lay out a model for a management structure that balances the local, regional, and global demands placed on companies operating across the world's many borders. In the volatile world of transnational corporations, there is no such thing as a "universal" global manager, the authors say. Rather, there are three groups of specialists: business managers, country managers, and functional managers. And there are the top executives at corporate headquarters who manage the complex interactions between the three--and can identify and develop the talented executives that a successful transnational requires. This kind of organizational structure characterizes a transnational rather than an old-line multinational, international, or global company. Transnationals integrate assets, resources, and diverse people in operating units around the world. Through a flexible management process, in which business, country, and functional managers form a triad of different perspectives that balance one another, transnational companies can build three strategic capabilities: global-scale efficiency and competitiveness; national-level responsiveness and flexibility; and cross-market capacity to leverage learning on a worldwide basis. Through a close look at the successful careers of Leif Johansson of Electrolux, Howard Gottlieb of NEC, and Wahib Zaki of Procter & Gamble, the authors illustrate the skills that each managerial specialist requires.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Forget capital; it's relatively easy to obtain nowadays. Today's scarce, sought-after strategic resource is expertise, which comes in the form of employees. Although organizations have changed mightily from the days of hierarchical, top-down management, they still have a long way to go. In addition to issues of company structure and who should be involved in strategic decision making, there are questions of how the value that companies create should be distributed, now that employees, as well as shareholders, control a scarce resource. And then there are the intangible yet crucial changes that must occur in senior managers' ways of thinking--and in the atmosphere and culture of the company. Reorienting old-school senior managers away from capital and toward knowledgeable employees will be difficult, but Christopher Bartlett of Harvard Business School and Sumantra Ghoshal of London Business School have several recommendations for human resources professionals, who, Bartlett and Ghoshal maintain, will be key players in the design, development, and delivery of strategy. Their task is threefold: build up the company by acquiring and retaining highly skilled employees; find a way to embed individual-based knowledge in the company, making it accessible and useful not just to one unit or one function, but to the entire organization--that is the linking task; and create an engaging, motivating, and bonding culture to attract and keep talented employees--the bonding task.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Vertical command and control sabotages organizations that need bottom-up innovation to be competitive. Yet, organizational integration is increasingly essential. New research shows how technology is helping cutting-edge companies meet the challenge by integrating horizontally. A fundamental management challenge, particularly in large, diversified global enterprises, is the tension between subunit autonomy and companywide cohesion. New research uncovers several ways top companies balance that tension. In the last decade, performance criteria often ignored how managers of subunits contributed to companywide performance. Empowerment efforts improved unit competitiveness but left knowledge sharing behind. Today (because customer needs span internal boundaries and technology has changed the way innovation gets managed) managers are recognizing the need to address the integration side of the tension. At one company, BP, CEO John Browne created a peer-assist process to help his business unit leaders integrate horizontally. Managers who ran similar businesses were assigned to help one another improve both individual and collective performance. As the culture evolved and managers successfully handled ever tougher endeavors, both entrepreneurship and mutual trust were strengthened. Executives who want to build horizontal integration without disrupting entrepreneurship must allow time for persistent action and reinforcement to take hold.

Managers will tell you that the resource they lack most is time. If you watch them, you'll see them rushing from meeting to meeting, checking their e-mail constantly, fighting fires. Managers think they are attending to important matters, but they're really just spinning their wheels. For the past 10 years, the authors have studied the behavior of busy managers, and their findings should frighten you: Fully 90% of managers squander their time in all sorts of ineffective activities. A mere 10% of managers spend their time in a committed, purposeful, and reflective manner. Effective action relies on a combination of two traits: focus--the ability to zero in on a goal and see the task through to completion--and energy--the vigor that comes from intense personal commitment. Focus without energy devolves into listless execution or leads to burnout. Energy without focus dissipates into aimless busyness or wasteful failures. Plotting these two traits into a matrix provides a useful framework for understanding productivity levels of different managers. This article will help you identify which managers in your organization are making a real difference--and which just look busy.

Conventional wisdom says that companies from the periphery of the global market can't compete against established global giants from Europe, Japan, and the United States. Companies from developing countries have entered the game too late; they don't have the resources. But Christopher Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal disagree. The problem for most aspiring multinationals from peripheral countries, say the authors, is that they enter the global marketplace in low-margin businesses at the bottom of the value curve, and they stay there. But it doesn't have to be that way. They studied 12 emerging multinationals based in such countries--from emerging markets like Brazil to relatively more prosperous yet still peripheral nations like Australia to developing countries like the Philippines. These companies now enjoy global success because they treated global competition as an opportunity to build capabilities and move into more profitable segments of their industry. The path to globalization isn't easy, but the authors show that it is possible. Each company in the study overcame the same core challenges. They broke out of the mind-set that they were unable to compete successfully on the global stage. They adopted strategies that made being a late mover a source of competitive advantage. They developed a culture of continual cross-border learning. And they all had leaders who drove them relentlessly up the value curve. The companies discussed in this article are models for the thousands of marginal companies in peripheral economies that have the potential to become legitimate global players.

Today, the most urgent challenge for most companies is to develop the managers who must operate in the new delayered, horizontal, networked organizations to deliver on their complex, multidimensional strategic priorities. It is here that most companies are facing the greatest difficulties. The reason lies in the historic "Russian-doll model of management," in which managers at each level are expected to play similar roles and have similar responsibilities, only for a different size and scope of activities. The underlying premise that there is a generic management role is being further reinforced by many companies currently engaged in the new fad of identifying a set of desired personal competencies as the anchor for their management development initiatives. This article challenges this Russian-doll model of management to argue that managers at different levels of the organization play distinctly different roles and add value in fundamentally different ways. Based on field research in twenty major corporations, the authors identify the roles of front-line, senior, and top-level managers in the new organizational form, and how companies can develop these new managerial competencies.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Why are some companies able to remain vital, even after extensive reengineering, while others flounder and fail? The answer, according to these authors, lies in a company's ability to rejuvenate its employees by establishing a behavioral context with four characteristics: discipline, support, trust, and stretch. The authors trace postwar corporate history to identify the pernicious qualities that have ossified many companies, using Westinghouse as an example of an oppressive context based on the elements of compliance, control, constraint, and contract. They also show how companies like Intel and 3M have renewed themselves by creating an environment in which people are the most important resource.

In the postwar years, planning and control systems were the tools that enabled companies to grow and helped managers deal with sprawling enterprises. Yet many of the problems companies experience today are inherent in the strategy-structure-systems doctrine that produced those tools. The systems that allowed managers to control employees also inhibited creativity and initiative. Today the challenge for top-level managers is to engage the knowledge and skills of each person in the organization in order to create what the authors call an individualized corporation. In the individualized corporation, top-level managers don't direct and correct middle and frontline managers; they create an environment in which individuals monitor themselves. The authors have conducted research on 20 high-performing corporations. They have concluded that systems, no matter how sophisticated, can never replace the richness of close personal communication and contact between top-level and frontline managers.

The hierarchical organization based on the strategy-structure-systems doctrine of management no longer delivers competitive results. While a top-down structure of corporate divisions gives managers tight control and allows companies to grow, it also fragments resources and creates a vertical organization that prevents small units from sharing their strengths with one another. Structural fixes, such as skunk works, alliances, and acquisitions, have not solved the problem. Based on a study of 20 companies with vanguard management styles, the authors predict a managerial revolution that will focus on horizontal processes rather than vertical structures. The job of management will be to promote three core organizational processes: frontline entrepreneurship, competence building, and renewal.

Structure follows strategy; and systems support structure. In the high-growth environment of post-World War II, a management doctrine rose up around these two aphorisms. But today the business environment has changed. A change in management doctrine is needed to match this new landscape. After 5 years researching 20 leading European, U.S., and Japanese companies, the authors concluded that senior managers must change their own priorities and way of thinking. Beyond designing corporate strategy, they must shape a shared institutional purpose. They must expand their focus from devising formal structures to developing organizational processes. And more than just managing systems, they must develop people. Top management's role in the companies researched already reflects the changes the authors prescribe. Consequently, 3M has managed to retain an entrepreneurial spirit despite its $14 billion bulk. ABB transformed two "also-ran" companies into the leading competitors in the global power-equipment industry. And companies like AT&T, Royal Dutch/Shell, Intel, Andersen Consulting, Kao, and Corning are doing well despite what some predicted as the inevitable decline of large corporations.

Building on its existing strengths in the systems integration business, Andersen Consulting is aiming to create the business of "business integration", i.e. to help clients re-structure their companies through an integrated and coherent review of strategy, operations and information technology capabilities. The case describes the challenges being faced by Andersen in creating the new competencies required to support this business thrust, and in integrating these competencies with its existing strengths in the systems integration business.

In many companies, strategic thinking has outdistanced organizational capability. Often these companies make the mistake of adopting elaborate organizational matrices that actually impair their ability to implement sophisticated strategies. Keeping a company strategically agile while still coordinating its activities across divisions, even continents, means eliminating parochialism, improving communication, and weaving the decision-making process into the company's social fabric. The goal is to build a matrix of corporate values and priorities in the minds of managers and let them make the judgments and negotiate the deals that make strategy pay off.

To be competitive in an increasingly complex international environment, companies with worldwide operations must achieve global coordination and national flexibility simultaneously. Traditional organizational forms, however, have tended to provide one or the other attribute. The authors illustrate this point through the experience of two major competitors in consumer electronics: Philips, a classic "multinational" company whose decentralized federation structure is well-suited to facilitating national flexibility, and Matsushita, a "global" company with a centralized hub configuration that provides it with great efficiency. The authors then describe an emerging model--the "transnational" organization whose structure is based on an integrated network of worldwide operations. The transnational firm requires both effective corporate management that does not impede national flexibility and efficient country management that does not prevent global coordination.

Describes the development of Matsushita's international operations and the building of its dominant competitive position in the consumer electronics industry. Picks up the major challenges facing the company in 1987 as both its product focus and geographic posture are brought into question. The president is implementing two projects, Action 86 to shift the business focus from consumer to industrial electronics and Operation Localization to shift more of the value added offshore.

When Procter & Gamble launched Pampers in Europe, it directed the marketing strategy from European headquarters. The result: a big flop. In pushing new strategies successful MNCs diverge from traditional hierarchical structures in which the top formulates--and the national subsidiary simply implements--strategy and planning. By cooperating and co-opting capabilities, the parent's sales and market share get a big boost from the country unit's technical expertise, market knowledge, and competitive awareness--all without losing boundary-crossing benefits like scale economies.