Sumantra Ghoshal

Sumantra Ghoshal
Born	September 26, 1948 Kolkata, India
Died	March 3, 2004 (aged 55) Hampstead, United Kingdom
Nationality	Indian
Fields	Management
Alma mater	Delhi University Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management Harvard Business School MIT Sloan School of Management

Sumantra Ghoshal (1948–2004) was an academic in the field of management. 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 (Bartlett & Ghoshal 2002), 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.

Early life

Ghoshal was born in Calcutta.

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

Career

In 1985, he joined INSEAD Business School in France 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.

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, 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, ITT	Exxon, Toyota	IBM, Ericsson

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.

Bibliography

Ghoshal published 10 books, over 70 articles and several award-winning case studies.

• The Differential Network: Organizing the Multinational Corporation for Value Creation, a book he co-authored with Nitin Nohria, won the George Terry Book Award in 1997.
• The Individualized Corporation:A Fundamentally New Approach to Management, co-authored with Christopher A. Bartlett, won the Igor Ansoff Award in 1997, and has been translated into seven languages.
• Managing Radical Change, won the Management Book of the Year award in India. He was described by The Economist as 'Euroguru'.
• Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution (Bartlett & Ghoshal 2002), a book he co-authored with Christopher A. Bartlett, has been listed in the Financial Times as one of the 50 most influential management books and has been translated into nine languages.
• The Strategy Process: Concepts, Contexts, Cases : Global by Henry Mintzberg, Joseph Lampel, James Brian Quinn, and Sumantra Ghoshal, 2002.
• The Differentiated Network : Organizing Multinational Corporations for Value Creation (The Jossey-Bass Business & Management Series) by Nitin Nohria and Sumantra Ghoshal (Hardcover - Feb 19, 1997)
• Sumantra Ghoshal on Management : A Force for Good by Julian Birkinshaw and Gita Piramal (Hardcover - Feb 1, 2006)

References

• Bartlett, Christopher A.; Ghoshal, Sumantra (2002), Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution, Harvard Business Press, pp. 391, ISBN 1578517079, http://books.google.com/books?id=KYjHMVuNOAwC 

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 Management: 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

Awards

His last book, Managing Radical Change, won the Management Book of the Year award in India. He was described by The Economist as 'Euroguru'....