Ghemawat Pankaj
IESE Business School, Barcelona, Spain.
Harv Bus Rev. 2007 Mar;85(3):58-68, 140.
The main goal of any international strategy should be to manage the large differences that arise at the borders of markets. Yet executives often fail to exploit market and production discrepancies, focusing instead on the tensions between standardization and localization. In this article, Pankaj Ghemawat presents a new framework that encompasses all three effective responses to the challenges of globalization. He calls it the AAA Triangle. The A's stand for the three distinct types of international strategy. Through adaptation, companies seek to boost revenues and market share by maximizing their local relevance. Through aggregation, they attempt to deliver economies of scale by creating regional, or sometimes global, operations. And through arbitrage, they exploit disparities between national or regional markets, often by locating different parts of the supply chain in different places--for instance, call centers in India, factories in China, and retail shops in Western Europe. Ghemawat draws on several examples that illustrate how organizations use and balance these strategies and describes the trade-offs they make as they do so. Because most enterprises should draw from all three A's to some extent, the framework can be used to develop a summary scorecard indicating how well the company is globalizing. However, given the tensions among the strategies, it's not enough simply to tick off the corresponding boxes. Strategic choice requires some degree of prioritization--and the framework can help with that as well. While it is possible to make progress on all three strategies, companies usually must focus on one or two when trying to build competitive advantage.
任何国际战略的主要目标都应该是应对市场边界出现的巨大差异。然而，企业高管往往未能利用市场和生产方面的差异，而是将重点放在标准化和本地化之间的矛盾上。在本文中，潘卡基·格玛沃特提出了一个新框架，该框架涵盖了应对全球化挑战的所有三种有效应对措施。他将其称为AAA三角。A代表三种不同类型的国际战略。通过适应性调整，公司试图通过最大化其在当地的相关性来提高收入和市场份额。通过聚合，它们试图通过创建区域或有时是全球运营来实现规模经济。而通过套利，它们利用国家或地区市场之间的差异，通常是将供应链的不同部分设在不同的地方——例如，将呼叫中心设在印度，工厂设在中国，零售店设在西欧。格玛沃特列举了几个例子来说明组织如何运用和平衡这些战略，并描述了它们在这样做时所做出的权衡。由于大多数企业在某种程度上都应该借鉴这三种A战略，因此该框架可用于制定一份总结记分卡，以表明公司在全球化方面的表现如何。然而，鉴于这些战略之间的矛盾，仅仅勾选相应的选项是不够的。战略选择需要一定程度的优先级排序——而该框架也能在这方面提供帮助。虽然在所有三种战略上都取得进展是可能的，但企业在试图建立竞争优势时通常必须专注于其中一两种战略。
