What drives enterprise: talent or motivation?

July 2008 | By Javier Roza, Professor at IE Business School

The alignment of markets and companies is an inevitable result of globalization, but a highly motivated team can gain competitive advantages by breaking the mould.

Let us accept for a moment that multinational business sets the latest trends in management. In this type of environment, country managers do not normally generate product innovation or communication on an individual basis; they are usually not even responsible for production, and in some cases they do not produce their own organisational design. In this situation, local responsibility consists of implementing the strategies developed centrally.

Let us also accept that countries in the same geopolitical environment have a similar level of development and that the consumer pattern is one of convergence. Enterprises also converge in terms of the brands and products they market. Systems and processes are also global. Even the type and quality of employees are becoming more and more consistent owing to the similarity of recruitment and promotion processes. And to cap it all, competitors are the same in each country, complete with globalised strategies.

Furthermore, technical capacities are increasingly reaching the same level. It is becoming more and more difficult to gain a sustainable competitive advantage through technology. When a new product triumphs, competitors rapidly appear with similar products and more competitive offers.