Whether you trace them back to Assyrian trading networks in 2000BC, or only as far as the mid-19th century when the modern cross-border joint-stock company was born, multinationals have had a good run.

But Sam Palmisano, former chief executive of IBM, thinks they are reaching the end of their natural life. Multinationals’ hub-and-spoke model will be superseded by “globally integrated enterprises” (GIEs), which will shed national identity and serve customers from wherever in the world makes most sense, backed by a global supply chain and global support functions. Such companies will be more productive, innovative and agile.

To get there, though, multinationals will have to adopt unfamiliar ways of working and managing and adapt deep-seated national cultures, while younger, more flexible enterprises, built from scratch along global lines, snap at their heels. The GIE idea is also haunted by the sometimes sorry history of companies such as Philips and ABB, which switched from command-and-control to “matrix” management in the 1990s.