Organizations and Markets

Poor INSEAD

20 November 2007 at 12:18 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Business school Insead, founded in 1957 in Fontainebleau, France, opened a campus in Singapore in 2000 and markets itself as “Business School for the World.” “People assume the majority of faculty and students are French,” complains Insead Dean Frank Brown. “That’s not true.”

We’re not French — not that there’s anything wrong with that. This comes from an interesting item about firms with multiple corporate headquarters in yesterday’s WSJ. Lenovo has corporate offices in Beijing, Singapore and Raleigh, N.C. Thomson SA CEO Frank Dangeard says he doesn’t “want people to think we’re based anyplace.” Lenovo’s William Amelio claims the concept of a home country is “outdated.” (Pankaj Ghemawat, call your office!)

There’s a bit of work in multinational strategy about the distribution of subsidiaries across countries and the relationships between subsidiaries and the corporate office. I’m not aware of any studies on multiple corporate offices, however. Any suggestions?

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Strategic Management, Theory of the Firm.