Business Commons^™

Have You Restructured For Global Success?, Nirmalya Kumar, Phanish Puranam

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The organizational structures of many multinational corporations are inadequate to the task of capitalizing on opportunities in emerging markets. Locating customer-facing processes in each country-and even using transnational structures that exploit location-specific advantages-just doesn't cut it anymore. So argue Kumar and Puranam, of London Business School. The authors show how the growth of China and India as lead markets and as talent pools, coupled with advances in technology, enable companies to optimize their organizations by segmenting R&D both vertically and horizontally, thereby creating T-shaped structures.The greatest challenge of the T-shaped structure is managing integration across countries. The solution is to …