What's the Most Crucial Lesson You've Learned About How a Company Builds a Global Competitive Advantage?

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Let's go back in time to more than two decades ago when David R. Whitwam was chairman and CEO of the Whirlpool Corporation. He had his challenges.

According to Whitwam, too many managers are still running their businesses with the same old regional fiefdoms and inadequate ways of satisfying customers. As a result, few would-be global companies have escaped the deadly war of attrition in which cost and quality are the only weapons and ever-declining margins the only prize.

In the following interview, Harvard Business Review associate editor Regina Fazio Maruca asks Whitwam:  What’s the most crucial lesson you’ve learned about how a company builds a global competitive advantage?

Here's Whitwam's response:

The only way to gain lasting competitive advantage is to leverage your capabilities around the world so that the company as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Being an international company—selling globally, having global brands or operations in different countries—isn’t enough.

Read more:  The Right Way to Go Global:  An Interview with Whirlpool CEO David Whitwam (March-April 1994 Issue)