My limited exposure in practice involved a huge japanese company, the kind that survived while still being huge even the dissolution of zaibatsu, using the approach of many semi-independent divisions. Sometimes the divisions would be even created specifically in different country to provide a place to put in a team whose leader is getting extra extra independency in hopes of delivering new products from scratch.
Sometimes you'd have people delegated out of one division/subcompany to provide help elsewhere - personally experienced this when we needed a PostgreSQL expert on a project where we subcontracted/bodyshopped for one of those subcompanies, and the headquarters delegated a postgresql core team member from japan, including having him visit for a time.
But day to day the decisions were local - the most feudal thing was that we knew one team (~50% of the company that was our direct client) was the most important one and that it's lead had actually more power than CEO - the specific division was essentially a way to park his independent team so he didn't have to deal with administrative overhead.
