Satish Nambisan, PhD, is the Nancy and Joseph Keithley Professor of Technology Management at the Weatherhead School of Management. His research interests lie in the broad areas of innovation management, entrepreneurship and technology management. His research has been published in a wide range of journals including Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Management Science, Organization Science, Academy of Management Review, Journal of International Business Studies, and MIS Quarterly.
Dr. Nambisan is the author of several notable books including The Global Brain: Your Roadmap for Innovating Faster and Smarter in a Networked World (Wharton School Publishing, 2008). His latest book is The Digital Multinational: Navigating the New Normal in Global Business (MIT Press, 2022). Prior to joining academia, Dr. Nambisan worked at consumer-products conglomerate Unilever plc. in Mumbai.
Your new book, The Digital Multinational from MIT Press, just came out. Could you tell us a little about your book?
The book’s primary thesis is that adoption of appropriate digital strategies could enable multinational companies to successfully navigate a dynamic global business landscape in which strong globalization and deglobalization forces coexist. As you know, in the past 10-15 years, digital platforms and technologies have allowed companies of all sizes and stripes to rapidly expand their global footprint, in terms of both operations and market reach – what we refer to as digital globalization. At the same time, rising nationalistic sentiments and geopolitical tensions have raised new barriers between countries, hampering multinationals’ operations. For example, as a consequence of the Russia-Ukraine war, many US and European multinationals had to withdraw from the Russian market. Similarly, continued US-China hostilities have affected the operations of multinationals on both sides. Digital sovereignty concerns have compelled several countries to enact new regulations and policies that affect multinationals’ cross-border data flows. A key challenge for multinationals, in the foreseeable future, will be to understand the nature and extent of these evolving globalization and deglobalization forces present in different parts of the world and to adapt their strategies appropriately. In our book, we suggest that digital business strategies could be an important part of their answer to this issue.
So what types of digital business strategies would help multinationals in this context?
In the book, we focus on what we call multinationals’ digital global connectivity – their digitally-enabled connectivity with markets/customers, ecosystems/partners, resources/knowledge, and subsidiary operations in different parts of the world. These four dimensions of digital global connectivity are very important to understand how multinationals can operate successfully in a world that is prone to pushes and pulls from both globalization and deglobalization forces. We suggest that multinationals can fashion their digital global connectivity along a tight-loose coupling continuum. The notion of tight-loose coupling will be quite familiar to those who have worked in the software industry. The same concept can be applied to the multinational context – to analyze the nature of multinationals’ internal and external linkages. In regions where globalization forces are dominant, they can pursue tightly-coupled digital connectivity, and in those places where localization (or deglobalization) forces are ascendant, loose coupling would be preferable. Tight coupling typically ensures greater strategic coherence, faster scaling of ideas, and operational efficiencies whereas loose coupling allows for more flexibility and adaptation to dynamic local conditions. Importantly, digital technologies can facilitate both tight and loose coupling. So, in our book, we go through each of the four dimensions of digital global connectivity that I mentioned earlier and discuss appropriate portfolios of digital business strategies.
What are some of the companies that you studied in writing this book?
We studied a wide range of companies in different regions and industries, that are leaders in rethinking strategies to adapt to the changing global business landscape – from consumer-product companies such as Unilever, Lululemon, Philip Morris International, and Burberry to industrial product companies such as Johnson Controls, Aditya Birla Group, and Bayer. We also studied several micro-multinationals in India and China.
Application of management principles to practice is more important than ever in today's fast paced work environments. How should experienced managers change their thinking during this time of digital transformation?
From a business perspective, these are indeed quite interesting, and may I add, challenging times. Globalization-deglobalization tension is only one of the key challenges that companies face. Companies are also grappling with a myriad of other important challenges. For example, consumers across the world now expect their brands (companies) to be more conscious of social problems and to make tangible contributions toward addressing them. Similarly, many companies are discovering that their employees have rapidly changing career and work-life balance expectations. As in the case of globalization-deglobalization, digital technologies can play a critical role in addressing many of these other challenges. For example, Unilever recently implemented an AI-powered enterprise-wide digital talent marketplace called FLEX Experiences that allows its employees in more than 190 countries to identify new career opportunities and upskill via flexible remote project experiences. The key point here is that senior managers have to move beyond a narrow framing of business success in designing and leading their digital transformations and think about how digital strategies could be an important part of their approach to making their companies more responsible members of the broader society—locally and globally.
You have been teaching in our DBA program for a few years now. What do you enjoy about teaching in the program?
I find that the most unique aspect of our DBA program is the quality and diversity of our students – they come from different industries, backgrounds, and geographical regions, and as such, bring a wealth of experience and practice-based insights into the classroom. Most of them are also quite clear about what exactly they want to gain from my class. This makes my job that much easier and enjoyable. As I see it, my primary job is to bring together theory-based ideas, concepts and insights on the topics being discussed and to help my students understand and appreciate their value in specific application contexts. For example, in my course (DBAP 614), we employ the ecosystem as a metaphor for an evolving complex business system and examine how organizations as members of such a broader ecosystem can adapt to the set of external forces they are subjected to—both market forces and non-market forces. Many of my students find that they can immediately apply such a perspective to their own organization context and this in turn leads to very rich and intense discussion in the classroom. It is the perfect melding of theory and practice and underlines our focus in this program on developing high-quality practitioner scholars.
