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With a burgeoning stream of online choices, fostering customer loyalty is a constant challenge. Companies must become masters of the new “nonstop customer” experience. They will at times have to analyze the data on their customers' behavior for new opportunities, and at other times directly influence their customers' choices.

Customers continue to escape from traditional marketing channels into digital realms where they can become more knowledgeable and empowered than they have been in the past. So the nonstop-customer experience model uniquely places evaluation, not purchase, at its center.

The article offers a new rule number one of marketing is: know your customer's behavior on their path to purchase.

To understand what customer journeys are being taken by customers, the model groups loyalty behaviors into four general archetypes: emotional loyalty, inertia-based loyalty, conditional loyalty and true deal chasing.

The article proposes that marketing departments act on the insight they gain from analyzing their customers in terms of the four loyalty profiles in two ways: by sometimes reinforcing customer behaviors, and at other times redirecting them.

This article aims to advise leaders of global enterprises who are increasingly concerned about the effects of international expansion on their corporate culture. It seeks to explain that companies that nurture a set of enterprise‐wide mindsets can maintain a unity of purpose while at the same time successfully adapting practices to diverse local economic and cultural conditions.

An Accenture survey of more than 900 senior executives on the challenges of building a global organization revealed that they are increasingly concerned with the problem of maintaining a common corporate culture and identity. The firm then studied the best practices of successful firms.

When performance mindsets are widely shared, they translate established company values into practices by means of commonly understood guidelines on how to recognize and solve problems – which, in turn, guide the organization in making decisions when faced with many possibilities.

Country managers must ensure that the company's values and mindsets are used to overcome the national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries that can block success.

With the participation of leaders at all levels of an organization a company's management of its performance mindsets can become a distinctive capability and thereby a source of international competitive advantage. By successfully following these steps for managing and propagating shared values and mindsets across diverse organizations corporations can produce winning performance in the competitive international arena.

Companies that operate globally have to be adept at managing certain tensions: between global and local, between differentiated and integrated and between many cultures and one organizational culture. So the authors aim to interview top managers to study how global leadership teams are coping with these challenges.

Over the past year, Accenture researchers interviewed more than 40 CEOs and top leaders at multinational companies to shed light on how they handle the “creative tensions” of competing on a global scale.

Three attributes were repeatedly cited as enhancing the performance of top teams and their companies: a clear charter and operating principles; the need to be agile about the way they think and whom they draw into the decision‐making processes; and the ability to “change ahead of the curve,”

The article describes how successful firms address each of the three challenges the leaders identified.

The article includes a diagnostic that leaders can use to see how they compare with highly successful global firms.

Multinationals have always needed an operating model that works – an effective plan for executing their most important activities at the right levels of their organization, whether globally, regionally or locally. The choices involved in these decisions have never been obvious, since international firms have consistently faced trade‐offs between tailoring approaches for diverse local markets and leveraging their global scale. This paper seeks a more in‐depth understanding of how successful firms manage the global‐local trade‐off in a multipolar world.

This paper utilizes a case study approach based on in‐depth senior executive interviews at several telecommunications companies including Tata Communications. The interviews probed the operating models of the companies we studied, focusing on their approaches to organization structure, management processes, management technologies (including information technology (IT)) and people/talent.

Successful companies balance global‐local trade‐offs by taking a flexible and tailored approach toward their operating‐model decisions. The paper finds that successful companies, including Tata Communications, which is profiled in‐depth, are breaking up the global‐local conundrum into a set of more manageable strategic problems – what the authors call “pressure points” – which they identify by assessing their most important activities and capabilities and determining the global and local challenges associated with them. They then design a different operating model solution for each pressure point, and repeat this process as new strategic developments emerge. By doing so they not only enhance their agility, but they also continually calibrate that crucial balance between global efficiency and local responsiveness.

This paper takes a unique approach to operating model design, finding that an operating model is better viewed as several distinct solutions to specific “pressure points” rather than a single and inflexible model that addresses all challenges equally. Now more than ever, developing the right operating model is at the top of multinational executives' priorities, and an area of increasing concern; the international business arena has changed drastically, requiring thoughtfulness and flexibility instead of standard formulas for operating internationally. Old adages like “think global and act local” no longer provide the universal guidance they once seemed to.

Using Triad-based multinational enterprises as their empirical setting, influential scholars in international management uncovered key organizational characteristics needed to create globally integrated and locally responsive multinationals. They proposed a “modern” theory of multinationals' organization (Hedlund, 1994). But recently, a new generation of multinationals from emerging markets has appeared. Little is known about their organizational choices and some scholars even doubt that they leverage organizational capabilities altogether. Does the “modern” theory still hold in their case? This exploratory study of three emerging-market multinationals (EMNEs) discloses that for reasons related to their origin in emerging economies and to the competitive specificities of these economies, EMNEs approach the global and local conundrum in ways which are both similar – and vastly different – from recommendations of the “modern” theory. We inductively develop a new theory that accounts for the evolution of organizational capabilities in EMNEs to reconcile global integration and local responsiveness. We discuss its implications for the executives of both emerging and Triad-based multinationals.