2000.Mailing Address: City University of Hong Kong, Department of Management, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong. E-mail: MGNKK@CITYU.EDU.HKNotes(*.) I am grateful to the Editor and OS reviewers and the following for useful comments on an earlier draft: John Schaubroeck, Sam Aryee, Andrew Chan, Robin Snell, Agnes Lau, Mary Pang and Jia Lin Xie.(1.) In their worldwide operation, IP executives recognize that only by being decentralized can they fully cater for the vast differences in consumer tastes, economic, competitive, cultural and political environments. This, in turn, creates a need for some form of 'integrative glue', and hence their quest for an 'IP culture'.(2.) These were the manifestations of IP as conceived at the headquarters. It is reasonable to assume that each subsidiary had a sub-culture which would not necessarily resemble the IP corporate culture in its entirity. One such difference is the general view that the centre was 'slow/conservative' and the subsidiaries 'fast-paced'. It was explained to me that the inculcation of a conservative/risk-averse approach was to harmonize standards in making reasonable and realistic decisions.(3.) Though some managers were critical of the training rationale and the elitism associated with MTD, they accepted the objectives of MTD. Two examples are noteworthy -- the Nigerian marketing manager (non-IP graduate), and the Brazilian technical director (IP graduate).(4.) Informal discussions with two such 'Senators' confirmed that the term is used by some managers visiting the Centre to signify the power of executives. However, they did not accept that lobbying and similar political activity played a role in career development, preferring instead to see it in terms of 'managers getting to know' the senior people if they believed they could learn from them. The generalizability of these views is impossible to establish because access to senior executives was very difficult....
