It used to be rather like being an ambassador. One of the juiciest jobs in many multinationals was that of country manager―running Australia, say, or Brazil. With all the might of Ford or Coca-Cola at your elbow, you were a power in the land. And for the people who developed the product back home, you were the gateway to their overseas markets. Even relatively young companies had these local grandees. As Mark Jarvis, chief marketing officer at Oracle, remembers, "it was like medieval England: the barons were much more powerful than the king. As a result, we had a lot of little companies aligned under a single name."
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