FORTY years ago, Theodore Levitt – then the most respected marketing thinker at Harvard Business School – wrote a pathbreaking article in the Harvard Business Review that contained the resounding phrase “the earth is round, but for most practical purposes it’s sensible to treat it as flat”.

As globalisation gathered pace, a growing number of companies followed his advice. Ford Motor launched an ambitious plan to build a one-size-fits-all car company under the slogan “Ford 2000”. The carmaker abolished a score of separate national units and replaced them with global product teams.

International Business Machines tried to turn itself into a “globally integrated enterprise”, defined by Sam Palmisano, the company’s chief executive officer from 2003 to 2011, as “a company that fashions its strategy, its management and its operations in pursuit of a new goal: the integration of production and value delivery worldwide”.