Introduction

Even if ‘strategies in global competition’ can be regarded as a fairly new area of research, the principal problem of strategy is the same: how to position and adapt the company to the changing environment. As will be evident from the chapters of this book, however, the environmental change of globalisation introduces more complex problems for managers to solve than other changes they have had to deal with so far. During the multinational — or multidomestic — era the foreign operations were run by subsidiary managers, and co-ordination across national borders was kept at a minimum. Often headquarters monitored by financial co-ordination and the organising of intermittent transfer of technology from the company's central research and development (R&D) unit.