By Yves Doz, José Santos, and Peter Williamson

Harvard Business School Press, 2001

272 pages, $29.95

Many books about globalization have argued that the dominant corporations of the future will be those that can develop global products and services and "project" them around the world. Those that can make such offerings, it is suggested, will inevitably benefit from massive economies of scale.

Yves Doz, Timken Professor of Global Technology and Innovation at INSEAD, together with two colleagues, José Santos and Peter Williamson, presents a different take on what will be needed to succeed in the global economy. In From Global to Metanational, they argue that the traditional method of going global, by projecting a homegrown formula around the world and using more efficient production, sales, and service organizations to penetrate markets, is passé. The authors’ conclusions are based on five years of research, studying thirty-six companies, from which they selected a smaller group for deeper analysis. Among this latter group are interesting firms like Acer, Nokia, PixTech, PolyGram, Shiseido, and STMicroelectronics. These organizations, the authors contend, are not global "projectors" but "prospectors." That is, they have the enhanced peripheral vision of, and they function as, entrepreneurs, but in a global arena in which the key resource — knowledge — is increasingly diverse and scattered. Because of this ongoing dispersal of knowledge, the authors argue, those with the wide-ranging external focus of prospectors will outcompete the more limited projectors.

The authors describe the prospectors they studied as being on the path to becoming metanational companies, to distinguish them from traditional projector, or multinational, companies. A metanational organization would be able to operate in three separate "worlds" — sensing new technologies and competencies around the world, mobilizing capabilities to exploit emerging market opportunities, and optimizing operations for efficiency and flexibility. The key dynamic is the second world, which bridges the gap between the "explorers" in the first world, who access knowledge, and the "farmers" in the third world, who harvest its fruits. In the second world, the clusters of structures and processes that attract and meld knowledge are called "magnets"; magnets are usually temporary project teams that turn specific new knowledge into products and services.

The authors’ conceptual framework, with its three distinct worlds, is a clear challenge to conventional economies-of-scale global strategies. As such, it gives thoughtful global executives new targets on which to focus their attention. The authors claim that they are providing a "blueprint" for success in the global knowledge economy, but with no example of any company that has followed it, one wonders how practical their advice is for organizations that might want to become metanational.

The dynamics of prospecting and projecting are fundamentally in tension with each other, for the same reasons that entrepreneurial and bureaucratic cultures often clash. The youthful skills and irreverent mind-set needed for organizations to prospect are very different from the mature habits and disciplines required to project. There is no discussion of the role of history or culture in the success of firms like Acer Inc. and the Nokia Corporation. Perhaps prospecting and projecting are at different ends of the development cycle, with most organizations beginning life as explorers and maturing into farmers? Can farmers really follow a rational path to turn back the clock and go hunting and foraging again? In natural systems, aged organisms are replaced by the next generation, and the authors supply little evidence that the dynamics of the corporate world are any different.