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Chief Executives often talk a good global game. Articulate Percy Barnevik plays it with vigor. President and CEO of Zurich-based Asea Brown Boveri Ltd. (ABB) since 1988, Mr. Barnevik possesses a prodigious store of personal energy, a boundless grasp of business operations, and the clear determination to enhance his company's competitive mark in industry.
He's "at home" seemingly anywhere around the globe. Indeed, he jokes about being in his Zurich office only long enough to open the mail and see that the relevant messages get passed along. On a late-winter day in Greenwich, Conn., where he was interviewed for this article, Mr. Barnevik was less than three hours off a plane from Europe. Yet ABB's CEO was remarkably fresh, dynamic, and engaging--a dramatic contrast to the dusk over-running the bleak afternoon.
Two days earlier, Mr. Barnevik had been in Ukraine's capital of Kiev, improving (he expected) the prospects for the purchase of power-generating equipment from ABB plants in the U.S. and Germany. The day after the interview, Mr. Barnevik would involve himself in matters North American. In the meantime, Mr. Barnevik was offering a skilled player's revealing perspectives on the global business game.
"What I mean by true globalization is not only that you meet global competitors--that you export to other markets and compete with people there--but also that you have a presence in [product] development and, indeed, in manufacturing in many markets," declares Mr. Barnevik.
In fact, ABB, a US$29.4 billion company that markets and produces in Europe, the Americas, and Asia, is more than merely present around the globe. It covers the world with a matrix structure that from its description seems curiously contradictory. Embracing 5,000 profit centers and 1,300 separate companies, it's said to be both local and global, small and big, decentralized and centralized. And with ABB's 25,000 managers--a complement that includes 51 business-area managers and 41 country managers--just trying to figure out who has responsibility for what would seem to impede interpersonal communications and make more difficult the maintenance of a sharp customer focus.
"Maybe it is...wrong...to talk about contradictions," suggests Mr. Barnevik, stressing that the matrix's purpose is not to promote opposition, conflict, or infighting. Indeed, he insists the so-called multidomestic structure boosts global market clout through coordination even...