ABSTRACT
Is globalization breeding new forms of corporate reinvention? In the age of a globalized planet, the fate of businesses, companies and corporations is performed and negotiated on a global stage; and it is on this global stage that the conditions and consequences of reinvention are produced. “Companies”, write Scott D. Anthony and Michael Putz in Forbes (2009), “are increasingly recognizing that today’s turbulent times require nothing short of continual reinvention. Weathering today’s storm isn’t enough. Companies have to develop repeatable processes that regularly renew their firms before the next crisis hits”. There are indeed valid reasons to suppose that the develop-
ment of “repeatable processes that regularly renew” has become the only corporate game in town, and any failure to measure up to this new gold standard is likely to be judged by stockholders and markets as generating risks and problems. Reinvention is revealed as an intensely economic imperative from this angle, and no firm or corporation – no matter how seemingly
successful – should cast itself as immune from the ongoing requirements of redesigning, rebranding, refinancing or changing its business model. Just think, for instance, of Borders or Blockbuster – two illustrations of once highly successful companies rendered antiquated, and literally overnight, by the digital communications revolution. Today’s corporate obsession with “repeatable processes that
regularly renew” takes us into the heart of globalization, and particularly into the worldwide corporate impacts of outsourcing, offshoring, downsizing, Just in Time deliveries, the emergence of ultra-low cost competitors and collapsing barriers to entry. None of this is news that remains news, and certainly the debate over globalization has been well rehearsed at the levels of business, finance and the broader public sphere. Yet, so familiar are we with the message that globalization spells endless reinvention that it is all too easy to lose sight of the ubiquity of the reinvention programme in corporate life and multinational companies today. Metamorphosis rules, as companies such as Borders seek
to transform into Amazon, or Blockbuster into Netflix, closing old-fashioned retail shops and going into digital delivery. But the new metamorphosis model is about much more than the reorganization of balance-sheets, closing of unprofitable chain stores, refinancing and reappraisal of existing business models. It concerns rather the creation of value through the practices of reinvention itself, as companies, firms and organizations are refashioned to demonstrate to the market an in-built flexibility for the future. Hence, British supermarket giant Tesco announced in 2011 plans to generate an additional one billion pounds of revenue through reinvention initiatives ranging from banking to mobile phones. Consumer company Proctor and Gamble likewise has sought to add five billion pounds in five years from new initiatives and novel markets. And in the USA, Cisco Systems has shifted forcefully into new terrains – ranging from bringing Web 3.0 to China to installing routers
in space – and seeking along the way to increase its $40 billion turnover by 25 per cent in five years. An emergent corporate faith in the powers of plasticity is evi-
denced by the huge numbers of businesses, firms and companies undertaking endless reinventions of their organizational cultures, markets and products. The reinvention ideal required in new institutions is sometimes dazzlingly asserted and advanced. This is especially true in various sectors of the new economy, especially global finance, high technology and new service firms. The Finnish communications multinational Nokia, for example, embodies this ideology of organizational re-fashioning. Engaged in the manufacturing of mobile devices for the convergent communications and Internet industries, the Nokia Corporation employs staff in 120 countries and has achieved global annual revenues of over 50 billion Euros with sales in more than 150 countries. Yet this telecommunications giant actually began life as a paper manufacturer, and subsequently expanded into rubber works and the manufacture of galoshes; it was not until the 1960s that the company moved into electronics, and then subsequently in the 1970s into telecommunications. Today, in the early years of the twenty-first century, the grip of an imagination for reinvention continues as Nokia refashions itself away from mobile phones and towards mobile devices. The story of the reinvention of Nokia – from paper manu-
facturer to communications giant – is spectacular. So too has been its fall from the top. In 2010, the company announced a 40 per cent drop in profits, arising largely as a result of Apple’s ascendency in the smart-phone market. But the institutional changes associated with reinvention are not fixed. Indeed, the recent history of organizations suggests that reinvention is constantly unfolding. As Jerry Wind and Alfred West, Jr. write in “Reinventing The Corporation”:
The firm must design and implement any number of programs and associated processes which force the organization
to aspire to new heights and which require for their achievement a rethinking and re-engineering of current practices. … The reinvention process involves massive individual and organizational change that must be backed by leaders at all levels of the organization. Our training must prepare the firm for change that has no end.
