World Business (A Special Report): --- Building a New Home: Globalization is forcing Companies to rethink The corporate headquarters
Companies going global in a big way are learning to think small when it comes to their headquarters.</br></br>Gone are the armies of workers in downtown skyscrapers -- and vanishing quickly is the idea of a headquarters as the nerve center of a company. Under pressure to cut costs and eliminate redundancies, executives are abandoning lavish digs for simpler spaces, slashing many jobs and outsourcing others. At the same time, many companies are giving overseas operations leeway to make big policy decisions that used to be reserved for the home office.</br></br>"The brains of the organization aren't only where the head is," says Christopher Bartlett, a Harvard Business School professor. "The smarts are located all over the world, and the challenge nowadays is finding the best ways to connect them."</br></br>In this new climate, just what makes for a good home base? Landmark buildings in the company's founding city don't cut the mustard anymore, according to corporate-relocation experts. A global company must be close to its major markets, with easy access to an international airport. It doesn't hurt to have access to a multilingual local population -- not to mention one rich with executive talent.</br></br>Indeed, getting out of the hometown may be an advantage for many established companies. Citicorp Chairman John Reed, fearing his executives are too caught up in the comings and goings of New York's financial community, has threatened publicly to pull the company headquarters out of New York. Says a Citicorp spokesman: "If you're caught up with seeing customers and visiting with people hung up in the business, it lowers your vision to what's happening right now. But what you need is to be thinking 10 years out."