David Young

 The authors are all both business academics and management consultants. They have a common interest in the management of multi-business companies and associated organisational issues. David Young is an associate of the Ashridge Strategic Management Centre (ASMC) and an independent consultant. He has led the ASMCs research on the size, structure and role of corporate headquarters staff over the last seven years, and his management guides, Effective Headquarters Staff and Benchmarking Corporate Headquarters Staff (ASMC, 1999), are recognised as the premier publications in their field. He also co-authored A Sense of Mission (Economist Books, 1990), a book on the theory and practice of corporate mission, and has published several articles in Long Range Planning. Prior to joining ASMC in 1988, David had a long career with Pilkington, the international glass manufacturer. He is a graduate of Cambridge University and holds a diploma in operational research from Liverpool University. Michael Goold is a director of the ASMC, where he researches corporate strategy and the management of multi-business companies. His publications includeSynergy: Why links between business units often fail and how to make them work(Capstone, 1998), Corporate-Level Strategy: Creating Value in the Multibusiness Company (John Wiley & Sons, 1994), Strategic Control: Milestones for Long-Term Performance (Financial Times/Pitman, 1990) and Strategies and Styles (Blackwell, 1987). Prior to establishing the ASMC in 1987, he was a Senior Fellow at the London Business School and a Vice President of BCG. He continues to consult with a variety of clients. Michael holds an MA from Merton College, Oxford, and an MBA from the Stanford Business School, California. Georges Blanc is the Professor of Corporate Strategy at HEC School of Management. He has also been visiting scholar at Berkeley University (California) and visiting professor at Otago University (New Zealand) and Fundaçao Getulio Vargas University (Brazil). He is in charge of HEC relations with Latin America. His teaching and research interests cover business policy, with special focus on strategic and structural changes, cross-culture strategic management and policy in non-business institutions. Georges has published numerous books and several articles in these fields, including State Owned Multinationals (Wiley/IRM series,1987), Strategor: Stratégie-Structure-Décision-Identité (Dunod, 1993). He has been an expert for the French National Plan, for the OECD and for BIT (Geneva) and he is currently a consultant to several large private and public corporations in France and Brazil. Rolf Bühner is Professor of Business Administration at the University of Passau, Germany, and has also lectured in Japan, Australia and the United States. His teaching and research interests are in the fields of human resource management, new technologies and strategy. Rolf has published numerous books and over 100 articles in these fields, including The success of mergers in Germany (International Journal of Industrial Organization, 1991), Corporate restructuring patterns in the US and Germany: a comparative empirical investigation (Management International Review, 1997) and Increasing shareholder value through human asset management (Long Range Planning, 1997). In collaboration with large German companies, he has examined the impact of new technology on personnel and organisational structure. He received his MBA at the University of Munich and his PhD at the University of Augsburg.  David Collis is a Visiting Associate Professor at Yale School of Management. For the previous eleven years he was an associate professor in business, government and competition at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He is an expert on corporate strategy and global competition, and is the co-author of the recent book Corporate Strategy (McGraw-Hill, 1997). His work has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, HarvardBusiness Review, Strategic Management Journal, European Management Journa, and in the books Managing the Multibusiness Company (Routledge, 1996), International Competitiveness (Ballinger, 1998) and Beyond Free Trade (Harvard Business School Press, 1993). Professor Collis holds an MA from Cambridge and an MBA from Harvard Business School, and received a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard. From 1978 to 1982 he worked for BCG in London, advising European companies on corporate strategy and global competition. He is currently a consultant to several large corporations and on the advisory boards of Ocean Spray and Web CT. Jan Eppink is Professor of Management and Organisation at the Faculty of Economic Sciences and Econometrics of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is also associated with Boer & Croon Management Consultants in Amsterdam. He is the author of five books, and over 50 articles in national and international management journals. His book Management en Organisatie (with D. Keuning, Stenfert Kroese, 1979) is now in its seventh edition and is considered the main Dutch textbook on management and organisation. He has served as a non-executive director on the boards of several companies and non-profit organisations, and lectured for management and academic audiences in various European countries, China, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore and the USA. He studied business economics at the Vrije Universiteit from 1961 to 1967, and his doctoral dissertation was published in 1978.to several large private and public corporations in France and Brazil. 

Tadao Kagono

is Professor of Business Policy at the Graduate School of Business Administration, Kobe University. He performed the survey of Japanese headquarters with Shinji Takai (Associate Professor, Doshisha University), Yasuhiro Ueno (Associate Professor, Osaka Prefecture University) and Norihisa Yoshimura (Associate Professor, Wakayama University). Professor Kagonos publications in English include Strategic versus Evolutionary Management (North Holland, 1985) and How Japanese Companies Work (Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 1983). He is a recipient of the Best Book Award of Nihon Keizai Shimbun (1983) for his book on the diversification of Japanese firms, and of the Award of the Organizational Science Society (1985) for his international comparative study of strategy and organisation.

is Professor of Corporate Strategy at Universidad Adolfo Ibañez, Chiles leading business school, and the managing director of Proteus, a strategy consultancy advising Latin American companies. He is currently researching the strategic management of multi-business groups in emerging markets and competition in the telecommunications industry. He is the author of a number of papers on telecommunications, and a book on the ethos and corporate strategies of Chilean business groups, which will be published shortly. He was previously on the board of Intercom, a Chilean cable TV company, a director of development for the newspaper El Mercurio, a consultant with the Yankee Group in London and a finance director with Telefónica (Chile). He holds an economics degree and an MSc in finance, both from Universidad de Chile where he was a university scholar, and an MBA from the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, France.