Sumantra Ghoshal

Bio: Sumantra Ghoshal is an academic researcher from London Business School. The author has contributed to research in topics: Multinational corporation & Organizational structure. The author has an hindex of 60, co-authored 107 publications receiving 50822 citations. Previous affiliations of Sumantra Ghoshal include INSEAD.

Think again: management is the art of doing and getting done

Abstract: In the Autumn 2004 issue of Business Strategy Review we published one of the final articles by Sumantra Ghoshal. With characteristic intellectual brio, Ghoshal and his co-author Heike Bruch argue that effective execution lies at the heart of achieving superior business performance and that purposeful action-taking by managers — both individually and collectively — lies at the heart of effective execution. The trouble is that five years of research by Ghoshal and Bruch showed that only a relatively small proportion of managers actually engage in such purposeful action-taking. What are the causes of this pervasive lack of purposeful action-taking by managers? What is different about those who do take purposeful action? What can managers do to enhance their personal actiontaking ability? And what can corporate leaders do to create an organisational context in which others can take purposeful action?

Building Strategic Advantage Through People

Abstract: implications of the information-based, knowledge-driven, service-intensive economy. They know what the new game requires: speed, flexibility and continuous self-renewal. They even are recognizing that skilled and motivated people are central to the operations of any company that wishes to flourish in the new age. And yet, a decade of organizational delayering, destaffing, restructuring and reengineering has produced employees who are more exhausted than empowered, more cynical than self-renewing. Worse still, in many companies only marginal managerial attention — if that— is focused on the problems of employee capability and motivation. Somewhere between theory and practice, precious human capital is being misused, wasted or lost. Having studied more than 20 companies in the process of trying to transform themselves, we have concluded that although structure is undoubtedly an impediment to the process, an even bigger barrier is managers’ outdated understanding of strategy. (See “The Evolving Focus of Strategy.”) At the heart of the problem is a failure to recognize that although the past three decades have brought dramatic changes in both external strategic imperatives and internal strategic resources, many companies continue to have outmoded strategic perspectives. In the competitive-strategy model in which many of today’s leaders were trained, sophisticated strategic-planning systems were supposed to help senior managers decide which businesses to grow and which to harvest.1 Unfortunately, all the planning and investment were unable to stop the competition from imitating or leapfrogging their carefully developed product-market positions. In the late 1980s, the search for more dynamic, adaptive and sustainable advantage led many to supplement their analysis of external competition with an internal-competency assessment. They recognized that development of resources and capabilities would be more difficult to imitate: The core-competency Human, not financial, capital must be the starting point and ongoing foundation of a successful strategy.

Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and the Organizational Advantage

Abstract: Scholars of the theory of the firm have begun to emphasize the sources and conditions of what has been described as “the organizational advantage,” rather than focus on the causes and consequences of market failure. Typically, researchers see such organizational advantage as accruing from the particular capabilities organizations have for creating and sharing knowledge. In this article we seek to contribute to this body of work by developing the following arguments: (1) social capital facilitates the creation of new intellectual capital; (2) organizations, as institutional settings, are conducive to the development of high levels of social capital; and (3) it is because of their more dense social capital that firms, within certain limits, have an advantage over markets in creating and sharing intellectual capital. We present a model that incorporates this overall argument in the form of a series of hypothesized relationships between different dimensions of social capital and the main mechanisms and proces...

Toward a Knowledge-Based Theory of the Firm,” Strategic Management Journal (17), pp.

Abstract: Given assumptions about the characteristics of knowledge and the knowledge requirements of production, the firm is conceptualized as an institution for integrating knowledge. The primary contribution of the paper is in exploring the coordination mechanisms through which firms integrate the specialist knowledge of their members. In contrast to earlier literature, knowledge is viewed as residing within the individual, and the primary role of the organization is knowledge application rather than knowledge creation. The resulting theory has implications for the basis of organizational capability, the principles of organization design (in particular, the analysis of hierarchy and the distribution of decision-making authority), and the determinants of the horizontal and vertical boundaries of the firm. More generally, the knowledge-based approach sheds new light upon current organizational innovations and trends and has far-reaching implications for management practice.

Toward a Knowledge-Based Theory of the Firm

Abstract: Given assumptions about the characteristics of knowledge and the knowledge requirements of production, the firm is conceptualized as an institution for integrating knowledge. The primary contribution of the paper is in exploring the coordination mechanisms through which firms integrate the specialist knowledge of their members. In contrast to earlier literature, knowledge is viewed as residing within the individual, and the primary role of the organization is knowledge application rather than knowledge creation. The resulting theory has implications for the basis of organizational capability, the principles of organization design (in particular, the analysis of hierarchy and the distribution of decision-making authority), and the determinants of the horizontal and vertical boundaries of the firm. More generally, the knowledge-based approach sheds new light upon current organizational innovations and trends and has far-reaching implications for management practice.

The Relational View: Cooperative Strategy and Sources of Interorganizational Competitive Advantage

Abstract: In this article we offer a view that suggests that a firm's critical resources may span firm boundaries and may be embedded in interfirm resources and routines. We argue that an increasingly important unit of analysis for understanding competitive advantage is the relationship between firms and identify four potential sources of interorganizational competitive advantage: (1) relation-specific assets, (2) knowledge-sharing routines, (3) complementary resources/capabilities, and (4) effective governance. We examine each of these potential sources of rent in detail, identifying key subprocesses, and also discuss the isolating mechanisms that serve to preserve relational rents. Finally, we discuss how the relational view may offer normative prescriptions for firm-level strategies that contradict the prescriptions offered by those with a resource-based view or industry structure view.

Explicating dynamic capabilities: the nature and microfoundations of (sustainable) enterprise performance

Abstract: This paper draws on the social and behavioral sciences in an endeavor to specify the nature and microfoundations of the capabilities necessary to sustain superior enterprise performance in an open economy with rapid innovation and globally dispersed sources of invention, innovation, and manufacturing capability. Dynamic capabilities enable business enterprises to create, deploy, and protect the intangible assets that support superior long- run business performance. The microfoundations of dynamic capabilities—the distinct skills, processes, procedures, organizational structures, decision rules, and disciplines—which undergird enterprise-level sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring capacities are difficult to develop and deploy. Enterprises with strong dynamic capabilities are intensely entrepreneurial. They not only adapt to business ecosystems, but also shape them through innovation and through collaboration with other enterprises, entities, and institutions. The framework advanced can help scholars understand the foundations of long-run enterprise success while helping managers delineate relevant strategic considerations and the priorities they must adopt to enhance enterprise performance and escape the zero profit tendency associated with operating in markets open to global competition. Copyright  2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.