Adaptation to the increasing rate and unpredictability of environmental change represents the greatest challenge of the 1990s to large industrial enterprises. Increasing international competition, technological change, and volatility of interest rates and exchange rates, requires that companies reconcile efficiency with innovation and flexibility. What kinds of strategic adjustment by large enterprises are called for, and can large, mature organisations achieve the organisational changes required by external turbulence and new corporate strategies?

This study reveals the difficulties which the world's ten largest oil companies experienced in adjusting their strategies, structures, and management systems to new market conditions, and to the dangerous tendency for their strategies to converge towards a common ,industry recipe,,. The study emphasizes the need for companies to respond to growing environmental instability by relinquishing the supposed benefits of close vertical and geographical integration through centralisation, in favor of greater flexibility, responsiveness, divisional differentiation, and managerial initiative achieved through increased decentralisation of operational and strategic decision making.