ABSTRACT
This chapter recapitulates essential elements of the effective organizing of global business activities to achieve strategic responsiveness across a complex multinational corporation. It emphasizes the importance of the frontline agents who execute the business activities and introduce the notion of democratizing the strategic engagement of multinational managers and employees as a key feature of a new leadership paradigm in the responsive multinational corporation (RMC). The chapter proposes that the adaptive multinational corporation (RMC) should pursue an interactive strategy-making model that combines forward-looking reasoning of central planning with updated insights from decentralized responses taken in the different operating entities of the organization. The frontline around the periphery of the multinational corporation is particularly complex because it entails different business and functional operations--activities that are scattered across overseas markets that represent a fertile ground for democratizing the frontline stakeholders. There are ways to avoid the phenomenon of collective stupidity in the multinational corporation where much of the intelligence is anchored locally.
