This book is the result of a large collaborative effort between Alvaro Cuervo-Cazurra of Northeastern University and Miguel A. Montoya of the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (“Monterrey Tec”) in Guadalajara. We first met in 2008, when Alvaro was a faculty member at the University of South Carolina, which had a joint MBA program with Monterrey Tec in Guadalajara, where Miguel was the Dean of Graduate Studies. The initial teaching relationship evolved into a research collaboration, and since 2010, Alvaro has been working with a group of professors and Ph.D. students at the Center for Asia Pacific, led by Miguel, to gain a better understanding of Mexican firms. The outcome of this collaboration was a series of papers presented at academic conferences and published in academic journals. As the research progressed, it became apparent that a collaborative volume would be one way to deepen the understanding already gained about Mexican firms. Hence, at a meeting in late August 2014, we decided to organize a book that would facilitate the dissemination of the insights gained beyond the academic community. Alvaro and Miguel acted as coordinators of chapters written by authors from Monterrey Tec and their collaborators. In September–December 2014, the authors of each chapter gathered secondary data on the companies and industry that served as the basis for the comparative cases. We had a conference in early January 2015 to determine progress and improve the content and presentation of the cases, and to gain new ideas from the insights developed by other coauthors. In January–March 2015, once the cases had been created using secondary data, the authors of each chapter conducted interviews with current and past managers of the companies to understand in more detail the reasons behind the actions taken, and gather additional information that was not publicly available. We had another conference in May 2015 to integrate the completion of the cases with the interview data and draw conclusions. We worked on the drafts of the chapters throughout 2016 and 2017 to ensure consistency in the arguments, and to draw comparison across cases. What you are now reading is the outcome of this collaboration.
We are grateful to the people who supported us during this process:
To the co-authors of the chapters for being responsive to our continual demands for improvement to the manuscripts, and for juggling the research requirements with their teaching responsibilities;
To the managers and owners of the MultiMexicans for their willingness to provide candid explanations of not just the successes but also the failures that accompanied the transformation and international expansion of their firms;
To the Center for Asia Pacific at Monterrey Tec in Guadalajara, Mexico, and the Center for Emerging Markets at Northeastern University in Boston, USA, for financial support to meet managers and periodically share ideas and discuss progress in person;
To the staff at Monterrey Tec in Guadalajara, who helped coordinate the meetings: in particular, Omar Robledo. We appreciate all the research support of Eduardo Schcolnik, Miguel A. Montoya-Zaragoza, S. Raúl Silva and Karol Padilla.
And finally – and most importantly – we express our thanks to our families, who had to bear our absences and long hours of working on this project.
