Asea Brown Boveri.

A distinctly new breed of corporation emerged during the 1990s. The largest engineering firm in the world, employing more than 213,000 persons in fifty countries, Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) was the product of a merger between the Swedish company Asea and the Swiss company Brown Boveri, which was completed in August 1987. To manage such a vast organization with as minimal a bureaucracy as possible, ABB chief executive Percy Barnevik introduced a complex managerial structure. An executive committee supervises all facets of the operation while the company itself is broken into thirty-five business sectors with an additional five thousand profit centers. The objective was to combine the benefits of being a large, international organization with the advantages of a small business. Although it has proven highly effective, the intricate managerial structure and practice of ABB has thus far not provided a model for...