In his book, The End of the Nation State (New York: The Free Press, 1995), Kenichi Ohmae makes the following observations about country-based organization structures:
One of the prime difficulties of organizing a company for global operations is the psychology of managers who are used to thinking by country-based line of authority rather than by line of opportunity. Lots of creative ideas for generating value are overlooked because such managers are captive to nation state-conditioned habits of mind. Once that constraint is relaxed . . . a nearly infinite range of new opportunities comes into focus: building cross-border alliances, establishing virtual companies, arbitraging differential costs of labor or even services . . . . I strongly believe that, as head-to-head battles within established geographies yield less and less incremental value, changing the battleground from nation to cross-border region will be at the core of 21st-century corporate strategy.
Do you agree or disagree with these comments? Why?