Works
- Global competitive pressures and host country demands: managing tensions in MNCs, California Management Review 23(3), 63 to 74, 1981
- Organizing for worldwide effectiveness: the transnational solution, California Management Review 31(1), 54 to 74, 1988
- Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1989
- Matrix management: not a structure, a frame of mind, Harvard Business Review (July to August 1990), 1990
- ABB's relays business: building and managing a global matrix, Harvard Business School case 394-016 (25 pages), 1993
In Organizational Structures
Known for
The transnational corporation, with Sumantra Ghoshal.
Ideas
The transnational solution. With Ghoshal, Bartlett studied nine multinationals in three industries and described the transnational, which builds global efficiency, multinational flexibility, and worldwide learning at the same time, with its resources configured as an integrated network and its national units given differentiated roles. Caveat: Case research in nine companies, more prescription than test; Leong and Tan (1993) found partial support, and Devinney, Midgley, and Venaik (2000) dispute that the transnational is optimal.
Matrix as a frame of mind. With Ghoshal, the argument that matrix management is not a structure but a frame of mind: top managers lose control because their companies are organizationally incapable of carrying out the strategies they develop, and strategic thinking has outdistanced organizational capability. Caveat: A Harvard Business Review argument, not a test. Only its opening paragraph was read.
In this section, “read” means read by the Organizational Structures series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.