In the midst of an economic downturn, there is a tendency by some to think that things have never been so bad and that extraordinary new approaches are needed. But is this true? The current downturn is neither the only economic crisis that most managers will face during their careers. Nor is it the first downturn that business school scholars have studied.

Together with Chris Chung from Florida International University and Jane Lu from National University of Singapore, I have investigated whether there are any lessons from the 1997 Asian economic crisis for the managers of multinational corporations. We conducted a series of studies using a longitudinal database on Japanese subsidiaries worldwide, and report here on the managerial implications of two of them.