BEHIND THIS BOOK is a personal journey from a small city in India, to Indiana, back to India, then to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and recently to Barcelona. Professionally, I began to work on the ideas in this book in the mid-1980s, soon after I had joined the Harvard Business School faculty, when I wrote an early analytical piece on global strategy with Mike Spence, one of my thesis advisers.
My interest in imbuing my work on strategy with a cross-border perspective was whetted further by a study on India’s competitiveness that Mike Porter and I undertook in the mid-1990s for the Confederation of Indian Industry. Shortly after, I was fortunate enough to take over Mike Yoshino’s Global Strategy and Management course at HBS, which provided an opportunity to synchronize research, course development, and writings for practitioners on this topic. I have now been focused on issues related to globalization and global strategy more or less full time for the better part of a decade. This phase of the journey has yielded about fifty case studies and papers, this book, and sundry supporting materials such as a CD on globalization, my Web site (which also lists most of my work to date), and material for several ongoing projects.
I am particularly grateful to the Harvard Business School, which, under Deans Kim Clark and Jay Light, has generously supported this program of study for almost a decade. IESE Business School, under Dean Jordi Canals, has been a wonderful place to put the finishing touches on this book. I am also deeply indebted to the Harvard Business Review, where Tom Stewart, David Champion, and others have helped shape and support my attempts to communicate with practitioners. And, of course, thanks to Harvard Business School Press for its work on this book, with particular gratitude to Melinda Merino and Brian Surette for their counsel. Thanks also to my agent, Helen Rees, for guiding me, and to my editor, Jeff Cruikshank, for helping shape a jumble of complex ideas into a book.
My other, mostly content-related, debts are too numerous to acknowledge, including, as they do, learning from scores of colleagues, from the hundreds of executives I’ve interviewed, and from the thousand-odd students with whom I’ve worked through the concepts discussed here—as well as from many excellent writings, not all of which can be cited here. Still, I must specifically thank people who have generously read and provided comments on recent drafts of part or all of this book: Steve Altman, Amar Bhide, Dick Caves, Tom Hout, Don Lessard, Anita McGahan, Nikos Mourkogiannis, Jan Oosterveld, Richard Rawlinson, Denise Rehberg, Jordan Siegel, and Lori Spivey. My long-time assistant at Harvard, Sharilyn Steketee, did some of the research for the chapters, read through them, and managed the multiple incarnations of the manuscript. I am also indebted to Ken Mark and Beulah D’Souza for able research assistance. And last but most important, thank you to my wife, Anuradha Mitra Ghemawat, for the reason explained in the dedication—and for many more.