47 © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) Global Business and Organizational Excellence • DOI: 10.1002/joe.20154 • May/June 2007 Organizational Transformation— From Multinational to Global: An Early Dynamic Modeling Perspective ADAM GROOTHUIS & YUSAF H. AKBAR This paper examines the evolution of an organiza- tion strategy aimed at creating a global company. The paper offers a conceptual and experimental framework for this process. The article defines the adoption of a globalization strategy in terms of eco- nomic, “political” and “social” phases that are trig- gered temporally and spatially by agents and/or structural events. The process of transformation itself is a strategy and the adoption of a globalization strategy is dependent on the scope of the agent respective to its trigger. The evolution of a globaliza- tion strategy appears to be initiated by a need to lib- eralize rules and regulations both within an organization but also within a country that will lead to eventual economic benefits. The adoption of a globalization strategy provides further economic benefit, but requires increased liberalization and the creation of what this paper terms a “hybrid organi- zation.” Moreover, the commitment to integrate a globalization strategy involves a “social” component that requires acceptance of new organizational frameworks and is achieved through “normative dif- fusion.” Based on experimental data, this paper will highlight seminal literature to define a framework for the evolution of a globalization strategy and cre- ate a dynamic model to define a relative timeframe for an MNE to evolve a globalization strategy. Managerial implications are offered based on our analysis. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. How do companies with global ambitions translate this vision into successful organizational transfor- mation? While senior managers in a company may recognize the globalization imperative, how can this be spread through a company in order to achieve their globalization aims? How do companies move away from international expansion based on unstructured ad hoc approaches towards a system- atic, or systems-based approach? Our paper seeks to answer these and related ques- tions. These issues are pressing for managers who are witnessing increased global competition in their core markets. Moreover, recent years have wit- nessed a dramatic increase in the scope of this glob- al competition so that small, medium, and large companies alike are now competing in global mar- ketplaces—witness the competition between VoIP service providers and huge national telecommunica- tions companies as an illustration of this. Moreover, strategy and organizational structure are so interwoven that even the most elegant of global- ization strategies drawn up in the boardrooms of companies can fail when they are drawn down through the organization—unless companies adopt a more systematic approach to organizational global- ization. One way of building a systematic approach is to leverage new analytical techniques such as the one presented below. Christopher Bartlett and Sumatra Ghoshal’s seminal paper on “What is a Global Manager?” provided sig- nificant impetus for analyzing how and in what ways multinational enterprises (MNEs) can transform their organizational form from domestic or multinational ones into global organizational structures that would arguably enable them to compete in an increasingly competitive transnational marketplace. An implica- tion of Bartlett and Ghoshal is that the evolution of such an organizational change (allied to an intended global strategy) requires a significant change in both