Corporate Level Strategy: Creating Value in the Multibusiness Co

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"A vital and deeply researched contribution to thinking about corporate strategy."
—Professor Gary Hamel
London Business School

This groundbreaking book on corporate-level strategy is the fruit of ten years of consulting and research with corporations in North America, Europe, and Japan. Michael Goold, Andrew Campbell, and Marcus Alexander have focused on the question of how parent companies create—or destroy—value in the businesses making up their organizations. They propose a new approach to the management of multibusiness companies, based on the goal of "parenting advantage": being the best parent for each of the businesses in the corporate portfolio.

Multibusiness corporations around the globe are grappling with fundamental questions about what businesses their companies should be in, and how they should structure and influence their businesses. For many companies, restructuring and divestitures seem to be the sensible solution. But the authors of Corporate-Level Strategy show that size and diversity are not necessarily problems. More often than not, the fatal flaw is not the range of businesses in the portfolio, but the lack of a corporate strategy that will add any value to them.

Corporate-Level Strategy arms senior managers and corporate planners with a set of proven strategic principles and clear guidelines for successfully managing a diverse, multibusiness company. Citing lessons learned from their experiences at companies such as Emerson, 3M, and GE in the USA; Canon in Japan; BTR, Shell, and Unilever in Europe; and a host of other prominent multibusiness organizations around the world, the authors demonstrate that developing a clear corporate-level strategy to achieve parenting advantage is essential to the successful management of a multibusiness corporation. They show how and why corporate strategy differs from business unit strategy, why parents often inadvertently destroy value through their influence, and what the ingredients of a successful, value-creating corporate strategy are. They uncover a number of fundamental paradoxes parents encounter in their efforts to add value, and describe ways in which these paradoxes can be overcome.