HarperBusiness, 1993 292 pages
Global embrace: corporate challenges in a transnational world
by
Henry Wendt
The emergence of transnational corporations is one of the most far-reaching and controversial transformations under way in the world today. Yet transnationals - often confused with the old-style multinationals they are rapidly displacing - are often barely understood, even by the people they most directly affect. Now comes Global Embrace, a lucid guide to the global village that addresses not only the interplay of markets and competitive strategies but moves beyond narrow business concerns to explore the challenges this new corporate form poses to employees, managers, shareholders, political leaders, and citizens everywhere. Henry Wendt, the chairman of SmithKline Beecham, has spent his entire career in international business. The announcement by Smith-Kline, a distinctly American maker of pharmaceuticals and health care products, and Beecham, a British company in similar lines of business, of their friendly merger on April 12, 1989, represented the largest cross-border merger ever, and created at a stroke the kind of enormous transnational corporation that is changing the face of global competition. Who better, then, than Henry Wendt to describe the transnational world he has helped bring into being? Taking a penetrating look at the nature and impact of transnationals, Wendt describes the hard work that faces companies making the leap to transnational status. He provides valuable models of transnational strategy, organizational behavior, and operating structure, and he shows how to combine them to create superior transnational performance. He examines the perplexing issues of internal governance and external regulation raised by these vastly influential organizations. And he asks - andanswers - the tough questions that trouble ordinary citizens. He also offers a provocative look at the contradictory elements that make up the emerging transnational world. On the one hand, increasingly global standards of quality, performance, and behavior threaten to produce a single, homogeneous world. On the other, the last two decades have seen a vast upsurge in ethnic, cultural, and regional assertiveness around the world, usually at the expense of the nation-state. Paradoxically, argues Wendt, it is the very emergence of the transnational world that encourages local diversity and, for the first time, makes such diversity economically feasible. Bringing together all these strands of business strategy, global economics, and political policy, Wendt envisions a future in which "tribes and transnationals" are held together in a mutual global embrace that will utterly change the world of business - and the business of the world.
