From Global to Metanational: How Companies Win in the Knowledge Economy

Rating:
Summary: The new small world
Review: I was delighted to grab a better understanding on global competitiveness and the new productive opportunities provided by the Metanationals.

You don't know about it yet?? God, your business is under great danger...

Rating:
Summary: nothing new here
Review: Just a recap of ideas about globalization. They didn't even coin the term metanational, they probably read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) and stole it from him. Furthermore, the book doesn't even begin to deal with the issue of democracy in global corporations. These so-called "virtual states" are feudal by design, and fundamentally backwards. They may make money for their CEOs and boardmembers, and "stimulate the economy" (which really means helping other CEOs and boards make money), but where does all that money come from? Ultimately globalization just centralizes power and money, putting us back in the dark ages.

Rating:
Summary: Finding knowledge in unlikely places
Review: What does a large company need to concentrate on for sustained success in a globalized world? Doz and his colleagues claim that it is to become metanational and to become good at innovating from a platform of bringing together knowledge from many different parts of the world. Metanationals differ from globalized companies in that they recognise that new ideas, products or directions may originate somewhere other than the corporate centre.

The focus of the authors is on innovation and they argue that this requires that the organization becomes good at :
• identifying where good ideas and special competencies are;
• mobilizing the often scattered capabilities and opportunities (they use the term 'becoming a magnet' for such capabilities); and
• optimising the size and configuration of operations for efficiency, flexibility and financial discipline.

This is a book that makes an important point about success in a globalized world, but presents one factor in success as if it was the whole. As with a number of books, I had an uncomfortable feeling that the content of a very good article was expanded into an only moderately good book.

The core message is important and useful. Organizations that operate on a global scale need to move beyond the extension of a unitary culture into new localities and recognise that new knowledge is found in unlikely places. They need to become excellent at recognising that knowledge, becoming an attractor for it, mobilizing it to provide a superior stream of innovations and operationalizing production, distribution and marketing into diverse markets.

The weakness is that the book is written at a fairly high conceptual level - for all the detailed example - that fails to get to grips with how to manage multiple cultures or the detail of innovation, or the issues of governance across countries. It also has surprisingly little on the major changes that are occurring in world consumer markets.

The book also falls into the 'one size fits all' trap. Issues of being effective globally are very different for a consumer fashion business, a high tech product or service industry and a major commodity business, but this is not recognised explicitly in the book.