> you don't ask your underlings to write book reports on things that are of strategic business importance

Of course you do, that's exactly how it works.

Usually the 'underlings' do the research or collect information, and then the people higher up synthesise that information into a strategic decision.

No, you don't. Not when you literally have business units IN that country.

Yeah but, red tape. When you ask a business unit to do it, it becomes a whole big thing. When you ask somebody on your team to do it, it might not be as good, but it gets done.

Only if you don't actually care what "done" means. Anyone can make an omelette if you're willing to define an omelette as "literally any eggs cooked in a pan." But I'd rather just ask someone who actually knows how to make an omelette.

I guess it depends what you are trying to achieve by cooking an omelette. Taking the analogy to an extreme:

If you want to serve a really high-quality meal and are willing to wait a few days or weeks to get the omelette then you would probably wait for a chef from the omelette department, or hire in an external consulting chef. Note that a single omelette will take a long time to get this way, as you will probably also have to get authorisation to hire/spend money/use another teams resources.

If you needed food now, and if eggs in a pan now are better than omelettes in a few weeks, you would probably just find someone from your team to do it and you would have an omelette within the hour. It won't be as good, but it's better than waiting if you are hungry.

If you weren't cooking an omelette, and were writing a report trying to assess if the omelette team should be rolled into the frittata, you probably wouldn't ask the omelette team to write this report. Sure, they might have the most knowledge of how the team works and their capabilities, but asking the omelette team to write this report might have a pro-omelette bias because there is a conflict-of-interest in terms of job preservation.

I think the issue here is about how hard it is to ask for the chef to make you an omelette. If you go to https://food.gle type in onellette and your desk number then great. But first you have to even know that https://food.gle exists as an internal domain which might be something your underling has as much chance of finding out as you do.

Or, again, you ask the company about it because if they have business units in said country then that's probably a bridge they've already crossed ten dozen times.

That depends on how much internal politics there is. In some companies asking will make the other department concerned that you're going to compete with them for the market and they will then attempt to shut you down preemptively. Thus secrecy and keeping things internal to the the department since your greatest competitors are internal and not external.