Both of whom have gone on to become frequent contributors at Harvard Business Review and both have collaborated in writing several influential books and articles relating to leadership and organization managements.
Born in Calcutta, Ghoshal attended the Ballygaunge Government High School, and graduated from Delhi University with Physics major and at the Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management.
[10] Ghoshal's early work focused on the matrix structure in multinational organizations, and the "conflict and confusion" that reporting along both geographical and functional lines created.
Due to an ever-faster changing environment, Bartlett and Ghoshal see a further need for adaptation with a drive toward a company, that masters not one, but all three of the strategic capabilities of the named types.
In 1990, Ghoshal and Bartlett argues in their article with the Academy of Management Review that major multinational entities will be better understood if they portray themselves as interorganizational alliances, instead of considering itself as one big organization.
They continued with their theory, maintaining that company should create an institutional context that motivates individuals to act in the organization's best interests, rather than relying solely on hierarchical control.
[12] Ghoshal and Bartlett co-authored an article titled "Beyond Strategy to Purpose" with the Harvard Business Review where they argued that if a company's values are only self-serving, they lose appeal to both employees and customers.
Ghoshal explains that by promoting theories driven by a particular ideology that lacks moral grounding, business schools have inadvertently absolved their students from ethical accountability.
[2][16] Julian Birkinshaw, a fellow professor at the London Business School, remembered Ghoshal's warning that large organizations could lose their legitimacy unless they actively contribute positively to the world.
"[18] Such theory, Ghoshal warned, would become a self-fulfilling prophecy, a particularly stinging critique of the output of a majority of his colleagues in business schools that made him controversial.
To his death, his fight was against the "narrow idea" that led to today's management theory being "undersocialized and one-dimensional, a parody of the human condition more appropriate to a prison or a madhouse than an institution which should be a force for good.