SUMANTRA GHOSHAL ON MANAGEMENT -
A FORCE FOR GOOD (PRENTICE HALL)

SUMANTRA GHOSHAL on Management is an amalgamation of Ghoshal’s key management works spanning the 20-year period before his untimely death in 2004. It includes reflections and insights from colleagues and contemparies with whom he worked and collaborated. The book starts with his final work, “Towards a good theory of management”, where he tackles two sacred cows: the nature of business school research, and the substance of management theory.

Ghoshal is fairly critical of both areas. In the business school research arena, he argues that focus on causal relationships is not appropriate, but should focus on learning from the past, adapting behaviour and acting beneficially for the future. In terms of management theory, he argues that much of the theory, such as Michael Porters “five forces”, have influenced management practice for worse, not better. These theories have profoundly influenced an entire generation of managers, and while valuable in some instances, the overall effect has been negative.

The majority of the book is divided into three major segments:

Managing across Borders;
The Individualized corporation; and,
The new Management Agenda
Managing across Borders

This segment covers the first phase of Ghoshal’s academic career following a successful career in Indian Oil - basically the decade of the 1980’s. The core substance of this work recognises that the formulation of strategy was (and is), in relative terms, the easy part.

The management issue is in developing an organisation’s infrastructure and capability, in particular the management capability, to implement support and champion the chosen strategy. He coined the phrase that multinational corporations implement “third generation strategies through second generation organization, run by first generation managers”. A quarter of a century later this is not new, but has stood the test of time, being of inestimable value in helping develop the organisational capability of larger corporates..

The Individual Corporation

This is essentially a summary of the book of the same name written by Ghoshal and Bartlett, which is an extension of the theories developed in Managing across Borders. It embraces the idea that organisations need to be built around the ideas and initiatives of energised, empowered and emancipated people as distinct from the old notion that employees are forced into a mould of corporate thinking, behavior and constraints.

Where the industrial age was about strategy, structure and systems, the new model is about purpose, process and people. The role of leaders in this new model is to establish the purpose, define and agree on the core process and, most importantly, develop and nurture the staff so they can optimise their potential.

The new Management Agenda

This segment covers the decade prior to his death with a continued emphasis on the real management agenda facing executives in large organisations. Four broad themes are discussed and evaluated:

An analysis of the relative merits of organisational vs market dominance. He fundamentally espouses that large organisations are superior, qualitatively, to markets in developing value creation.

The necessity for executives to engage in meaningful action fulfillment rather then the busyness syndrome, and how the former can break inertia and unleash “organisational energy”.

Joint study with Lynda Gratton in the ways that senior executives can improve collaboration among team members using operational, social, intellectual and emotional tools.

A focus on improving the business performance in his mother country India, focusing on how he could influence significant change in organisations that had become comfortable with “satisfactory underperformance”.

Particularly over the last decade, Ghoshal was an outstanding management theorist and his work at the London Business School was key to those developments. This book, to some extent, is a fitting tribute to his life’s work and an important treatise on the development of management theory over the last 25 years. It is recommended as a thought provoking book which will become an important management reference for both leaders and managers.

ends