Sumantra Ghoshal
Encyclopedia
Sumantra Ghoshal was an academic and management guru. He was the founding Dean of the Indian School of Business
in Hyderabad, which is jointly sponsored by the Kellogg School
at Northwestern University
and the London Business School
.
Ghoshal co-authored Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution , with Christopher A. Bartlett, which has been listed in the Financial Times
as one of the 50 most influential management books and has been translated into nine languages.
He graduated from Delhi University with Physics
major and at the Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management
and worked for Indian Oil Corporation
, rising through the management ranks before moving to the United States
on a Fulbright Fellowship and Humphrey Fellowship in 1981. Ghoshal was awarded an S.M. and a Ph.D.
from the MIT Sloan School of Management
in 1983 and 1985 respectively, and was also awarded a D.B.A.
degree from Harvard Business School
in 1986. He worked on these degrees at the same time, writing two distinct dissertations on two different topics
and wrote a stream of influential articles and books. In 1994, he joined the London Business School
. Ghoshal was a Fellow of the Advanced Institute of Management Research
(AIM) in the U.K and a Professor of Strategic and International Management at the London Business School. He served as a member of The Committee of Overseers of the Harvard Business School
.
His treatment of management issues at the level of the individual led him to conclude that management theory that focuses on the economic aspects of man to the exclusion of all others is incorrect at best. According to him, "A theory that assumes that managers cannot be relied upon by shareholders can make managers less reliable."
Such theory, he warned, would become a self-fulfilling prophecy
, a particularly stinging critique of the output of a majority of his colleagues in business schools that made him controversial. To his death, his fight was against the "narrow idea" that led to today's management theory being "undersocialised and one-dimensional, a parody of the human condition more appropriate to a prison or a madhouse than an institution which should be a force for good."
Due to an ever faster changing environment, Bartlett and Ghoshal see a further need for adaptation with a drive toward a company, that masters not one, but all three of the strategic capabilities of the named types. The ideal-type thus created, they dubbed the transnational enterprise.
He died of brain hemorrhage.
Indian School of Business
The Indian School of Business is a business school in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India and is widely recognized as one of the top business schools in the world. It offers a Post Graduate Programme in Management , a Fellow Program in Management, and a Post Graduate Programme in Management for Senior...
in Hyderabad, which is jointly sponsored by the Kellogg School
Kellogg School
Kellogg School may refer to:* Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University* Kellogg School of Science and Technology at The Scripps Research Institute* Kellogg College, Oxford, one of the constituent colleges of Oxford University...
at Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....
and the London Business School
London Business School
London Business School is an international business school and a constituent college of the federal University of London, located in central London, beside Regent's Park...
.
Ghoshal co-authored Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution , with Christopher A. Bartlett, which has been listed in the Financial Times
Financial Times
The Financial Times is an international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and printed in 24 cities around the world. Its primary rival is the Wall Street Journal, published in New York City....
as one of the 50 most influential management books and has been translated into nine languages.
Early life
Ghoshal was born in Calcutta.He graduated from Delhi University with Physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
major and at the Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management
Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management
The Indian Institute of Social Welfare & Business Management is a graduate business school in Kolkata, India. It is the first institute in India to offer an MBA degree of any Indian university...
and worked for Indian Oil Corporation
Indian Oil Corporation
Indian Oil Corporation Limited, or IndianOil, is an Indian state-owned oil and gas corporation with its headquarters are in Mumbai, India. It is India’s largest commercial enterprise, ranked 98th on the Fortune Global 500 list for 2011...
, rising through the management ranks before moving to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
on a Fulbright Fellowship and Humphrey Fellowship in 1981. Ghoshal was awarded an S.M. and a Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
from the MIT Sloan School of Management
MIT Sloan School of Management
The MIT Sloan School of Management is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts....
in 1983 and 1985 respectively, and was also awarded a D.B.A.
Doctor of Business Administration
The degree of Doctor of Business Administration, abbreviated, or and equivalent to , is a research doctorate in business administration. The D.B.A...
degree from Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School is the graduate business school of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, United States and is widely recognized as one of the top business schools in the world. The school offers the world's largest full-time MBA program, doctoral programs, and many executive...
in 1986. He worked on these degrees at the same time, writing two distinct dissertations on two different topics
Career
In 1985, he joined INSEAD Business School in FranceFrance
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
and wrote a stream of influential articles and books. In 1994, he joined the London Business School
London Business School
London Business School is an international business school and a constituent college of the federal University of London, located in central London, beside Regent's Park...
. Ghoshal was a Fellow of the Advanced Institute of Management Research
Advanced Institute of Management Research
-Objectives:The Advanced Institute of Management Research is an initiative in the field of management research, with four key objectives:* Conduct research that will identify actions to enhance the UK's international competitiveness...
(AIM) in the U.K and a Professor of Strategic and International Management at the London Business School. He served as a member of The Committee of Overseers of the Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School is the graduate business school of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, United States and is widely recognized as one of the top business schools in the world. The school offers the world's largest full-time MBA program, doctoral programs, and many executive...
.
Ghoshal's legacy
Ghoshal's early work focused on the matrix structure in multinational organizations, and the "conflict and confusion" that reporting along both geographical and functional lines created. His later work is more ambitious, and hence perhaps more important - the idea that it is necessary to halt economics from taking over management. This, he theorised, is important since firms do not play on the periphery of human life today, but have taken a central role.His treatment of management issues at the level of the individual led him to conclude that management theory that focuses on the economic aspects of man to the exclusion of all others is incorrect at best. According to him, "A theory that assumes that managers cannot be relied upon by shareholders can make managers less reliable."
Such theory, he warned, would become a self-fulfilling prophecy
Self-fulfilling prophecy
A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior. Although examples of such prophecies can be found in literature as far back as ancient Greece and...
, a particularly stinging critique of the output of a majority of his colleagues in business schools that made him controversial. To his death, his fight was against the "narrow idea" that led to today's management theory being "undersocialised and one-dimensional, a parody of the human condition more appropriate to a prison or a madhouse than an institution which should be a force for good."
Forms of the international enterprise
In co-operation with Christopher A. Bartlett, Ghoshal researched successful enterprises on international markets. They found three types of internationalization, differing in structural approach and strategic capabilities. The types were dubbed Multinational, Global and International.| Multinational Enterprise | Global Enterprise | International Enterprise | |
| Strategic competency | responsiveness | efficiency i.e. output per unit of input | transfer of learning |
| Structures | loose federations of enterprises; national subsidiaries solve all operative tasks and some strategical. | tightly centralized enterprise; national subsidiaries primarily seen as distribution centres; all strategic and many operative decisions centralized | Somewhere in between multinational and global enterprises; some strategic areas centralized, some decentralized |
| Samples | Unilever Unilever Unilever is a British-Dutch multinational corporation that owns many of the world's consumer product brands in foods, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products.... , ITT ITT Corporation ITT Corporation is a global diversified manufacturing company based in the United States. ITT participates in global markets including water and fluids management, defense and security, and motion and flow control... |
Exxon Exxon Exxon is a chain of gas stations as well as a brand of motor fuel and related products by ExxonMobil. From 1972 to 1999, Exxon was the corporate name of the company previously known as Standard Oil Company of New Jersey or Jersey Standard.... , Toyota |
IBM IBM International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas... , Ericsson Ericsson Ericsson , one of Sweden's largest companies, is a provider of telecommunication and data communication systems, and related services, covering a range of technologies, including especially mobile networks... |
Due to an ever faster changing environment, Bartlett and Ghoshal see a further need for adaptation with a drive toward a company, that masters not one, but all three of the strategic capabilities of the named types. The ideal-type thus created, they dubbed the transnational enterprise.
Personal life
Ghoshal married Sushmita and they have two sons: Anand and Siddharth.He died of brain hemorrhage.
Articles
- "Beyond Self-Interest Revisited" by Hector Rocha and Sumantra Ghoshal, Journal of Management Studies, 2006 Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 585–619
- "Bad Management Theories are Destroying Good Management Practices" by Sumantra Ghoshal, Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2005 Vol. 4 Issue 1, pp. 75–91
- "Unleashing Organisational Energy" by Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal, MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 2003 Vol. 45, No. 1, pp. 45–51
- "What is a Global Manager" by Christopher A. Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal, Harvard Business Review, 2003 Aug;81(8):101-108, 141
- "Managing Personal Human Capital" by Lynda Gratton and Sumantra Ghoshal, European Management Journal, 2003 vo. 21, No. 1, pp. 1–10
- "Beware the Busy Manager" by Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal, Harvard Business Review, 2002, vol. 80, No. 2, pp. 62–69
- "Strategy as a Guided Evolution" by Bjorn Lovas and Sumantra Ghoshal, Strategic Management Journal, 2000, vol. 21, No. 9, pp. 875–896
- "Management Competence, Firm Growth and Economic Progress" by Sumantra Ghoshal, M Hahn and Peter Moran, Contributions to Political Economy, Vol. 18, pp. 121–150, 1999
- "Markets, Firms, and the Process of Economic Development" by Peter Moran and Sumantra Ghoshal, The Academy of Management Review, 1999, Vol. 24, No. 3, 390-412
- "Social Capital and Value Creation: The Role of Intrafirm Networks" by Wenpin Tsai and Sumantra Ghoshal, The Academy of Management Journal, 1998 Vol. 41, No. 4, pp. 464–476
- "Social capital, intellectual capital and the organizational advantage" by Janine Nahapiet and Sumantra Ghoshal, Academy of Management Review, 1998 23(2): 242-266
- "Theories of Economic Organisation: The Case for Realism and Balance" by Peter Moran and Sumantra Ghoshal, The Academy of Management Review, 1996, Vol. 21 No. 1, pp. 58–72
- "Bad For Practice: A Critique of the Transaction Cost Theory" by Sumantra Ghoshal and Peter Moran, The Academy of Management Review, 1996 Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 13–47
- "Building the Entrepreneurial Corporation: New Organisational Processes, New Managerial Tasks" by Sumantra Ghoshal and Christopher A. Bartlett, European Management Journal, 1995 Vol. 13 No.2, pp. 139–55
- "Differentiated Fit and Shared Values: Alternatives for Managing Headquarters-Subsidiary Relations" by Nitin Nohria and Sumantra Ghoshal, Strategic Management Journal, 1994, Vol. 15, No. 6, pp. 491–502
- "Interunit Communication in Multinational Corporations" by Sumantra Ghoshal, Harry Korine and Gabriel Szulanski, Management Science, Vol. 40, No. 1, January 1994, pp. 96–110
- "Beyond the M-form: Toward a Managerial Theory of the Firm" by Christopher A. Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal, Strategic Management Journal, 1993 No. 14, Winter, pp. 23–46
- "Matrix ManagementMatrix managementMatrix management is a type of organizational management in which people with similar skills are pooled for work assignments. For example, all engineers may be in one engineering department and report to an engineering manager, but these same engineers may be assigned to different projects and...
: Not a Structure, a Frame of Mind" by Christopher A. Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal, Harvard Business Review, 1990 Jul-Aug; 68(4): 138-145 - "Environmental Scanning in Korean Firms: Organisational Isomorphism in Action" by Sumantra Ghoshal, Journal of International Business Studies, 1988 Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 69–86
- "Creation, Adoption, and Diffusion of Innovations by Subsidiaries of Multinational Corporations" by Sumantra Ghoshal and Christopher A. Bartlett, Journal of International Business Studies, 1988 Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 365–388