Most books on global business strategy concentrate on productmarket issues of competition. Consequently, most of them provide a diagnosis that is dangerously partial, and occasionally positively misleading. All too often, results are achieved despite the best-laid market strategies. As Harold Macmillan famously replied to a young reporter's question of what troubled him most during his years as prime minister, `events, dear boy, events'. The events that can throw multinationals wildly off course are often political or societal in origin, not competitive as de®ned by reasonably similar organizations: remember United Fruit and ITT in the Americas and Hoffman La Roche in Europe. A narrow perspective on what can engender durable success in markets can, perhaps paradoxically, turn investments in planning into activities that increase risk.
To guard against such possibilities, this book surveys a much broader canvas. The ambition is both considerable and commendable. The authors lay out their claim and their advocacy of an enhanced perspective for managers right at the start: `part of the challenge of international business is to make sense of complex, changing and multi-faceted phenomena' (p. 1). Causal forces for change include national policies and politics, international relations, religion and a cacophony of confusing voices in¯uencing managers' choices: the international political economy (IPE).
Readers who wish to ®nd inspiration about how to make choices in, say, contemporary China, will not ®nd easy answers here. This is a book designed to support teaching. It is thoughtful, thought provoking and troubling in its implied message that narrow thinking too often produces avoidable mistakes. It is helpful, too, in its implicit message that, in a world without panaceas, there is no substitute for hard thinking even though logic may not reliably produce pro®ts.
The authors have attempted to summarize a library of complex, and often contradictory, literature into a coherent and commendably succinct 320 pages of text. Inevitably perhaps, there are casualties in such compression. The early chapters on the IPE rehearse the conventional economic models that concentrate on static ef®ciencies: dynamic adjustments to events are ignored. The later chapters on organization and decision processes within complex processes provide little guidance about how innovative ®rms build new resources in the ®rst place; how resources are leveraged across nations is a much more friendly setting for classroom analysis.
Yet despite such criticism, this book deserves attention for it is one of the few that probes beyond the obvious targets of conventional academic attention. It is, thus, a kind of half-way house sited uneasily between the certainties of theory and the uncomfortable realities of change that managers seldom comprehend fully. I