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Corporate-level strategy

Published on May 30, 2013 Reviewed on August 29, 2024   50 min

A selection of talks on Strategy

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0:00
I'm Andrew Campbell, and I'm the Director of the Ashridge Strategic Management Center, which is the research center part of Ashridge Business School. What I'm going to be sharing with you is the current state of my thinking on the topic of corporate-level strategy.
0:21
Most large companies consist of a corporate center supported by some corporate functions and reporting in are a number of business units or operating units. Often there is an intermediate layer between the corporate center and the business units, which are the business divisions. And this is the problem that I want to try and talk through which is the problem of strategy at the corporate level rather than at the business level.
0:50
One of the early insights that I got from doing research in this area was to realize that the layers of management above the level of the business unit in a large organization are doing much the same job which is they are parenting or they are managing the group of businesses and they share out the tasks of management between them. I have found it useful to call these layers above the business unit the parent organization.
1:26
This view of a large organization creates two main questions for corporate strategy work. That is what markets or businesses to invest in, something that's frequently referred to as portfolio strategy. The second question is how to manage the group of businesses or operating units for advantage. Again, this may be called management strategy or parenting strategy to align with the idea that the levels above the business unit are the parent organization.

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