long range planning

Long Range Planning 37 (2004) 79

www.lrpjournal.com

Executive Summaries
Netchising: The Next Global Wave?
Allen Morrison, Cyril Bouquet and John Beckand

11

This article offers a vision of the future for companies with global ambitions, but who are keen to avoid undue spending on overseas bricks and mortar and the time and energy involved in executive travel and attention. Identifying trade, foreign direct investment and franchising as three modes of MCN engagement, they authors proclaim the virtues of netchising as a superior global business model in many situations, releasing local entrepreneurial energy for product development and adaptation while using sophisticated internet contact to monitor and discipline overseas afliates to ensure quality control and defend hard-earned brand names. With examples taken from eld interviews with executives at 35 different MNCs, the authors examine how an increasing number of companies are exploiting this virtual network style of organization for procurement, sales, and maintaining customer relationships, and non-equity partnership arrangements to provide direct customer interfaces and local delivery of products and services. The article reviews four key factors governing whether a company is Internet-ready, and addresses the question of when netchising becomes a viable alternative to other traditional approaches to globalization. The authors provocative vision of overseas control achieved through other means than ownership is clearly one for the future of many companies.
doi:10.1016/j.lrp.2003.12.003

Globalisation, International Congurations and Strategic Implications: the Case of Retailing

Hanne M. Leknes and Chris Carr

29

Is this a dening moment for retailing? With international takeovers, expansion and retrenchment and bankruptcies, whether and how players in the sector should follow manufacturing in combating saturation, economic downturns and restricting legislation in their home markets by seizing opportunities in overseas markets has become a hotly debated strategic issue. This article investigates whether the new typologies, as outlined by Calori and others in a recent LRP issue, can be adapted to a service sector such as retailing, analysing performance differences across the set of categorisations as well as segregating some of the main sectors. It offers a case study demonstrating how this approach can yield strategic insights and recommendations at an early stage in internationalisation by examining the prospects and suggesting a globalisation trajectory for a Norwegian clothing market leader. The authors point out the U-shaped curve which sees performance falling gradually as strategy moves from the national to the regional stage, before improving markedly as it

becomes global, with the most protable retail strategy conguration the bold global shaper as also the most costly in risk and investment-terms. The article commends conguration performance analysis as a useful tool, both for strategic benchmarking against sector high performers to set an agenda for operational improvements, as well as facilitating the difcult judgements inherent in identifying the best international strategy choices.
doi:10.1016/j.lrp.2003.11.010

Middle Managers Moulding International Strategy: an Irish Start-up in Jamaican Telecoms

Inger Boyett & Graeme Currie

51

This article tells the fascinating story of how an Irish-Jamaican middle management team steered the strategy of an international venture away from the original short-term intent towards arguably far greater and long-term success. The authors case study of Digicel, an Irish company launching a mobile telecommunications network in Jamaica, is based on a sequence of interviews with both middle management in Jamaica and senior executive gures in Dublin. They identify the two distinctive groups of middle managers parent country nationals and host-country nationals and chart the extent to which they cooperated with or obstructed each other, and how they handled reporting back to a busy Irish head ofce. They show how middle managements transmutation of the executives original strategy for establishing a one-product, at-and-exible operation to be swiftly Jamaicanised and sold off stemmed from their realistic reaction to the social, political and economic situation on the ground in Kingston. This in turn yields an informed thesis from which executive management tasked with designing successful organisational strategy, structure and human resource management for an international venture can increase their potential for success by maximising the contribution of their PCN and HCN middle managers.
doi:10.1016/j.lrp.2003.11.008

Managerial Involvement and Perceptions of Strategy Process

Nardine Collier, Francis Fishwick and Steven W. Floyd

67

Should managers be involved in the process of developing strategyor not? Intuitively it sounds right, but academic research has produced mixed prognoses. Some observers say that involvement can strengthen shared vision, increase rationality and improve adaptiveness, while others point to damaging political behaviour, increased cultural inertia and the involvement of internal and external constraints. But do the positive effects outweigh the negative? Using a large sample (more than 6,000 managers from over 600 organizations, public and private, canvassed over seven years), the authors of this article study the correlation between managers levels of involvement and their positive or negative perceptions of the strategy development process. Their ndings not only conrm the positive effects of involvement predicted by the literature, but actually contradict the negative ones, which appear to be less evident in managers perceptions than researchers had forecast. Pointing
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Executive Summaries