Corporate Strategy in Multibusiness Firms

摘要

Currently, both academic and managerial understanding of what constitutes effective corporate strategy leaves much to be desired. While everyone recognizes that the objective of corporate strategy is to create shareholder value, how to achieve this is more contentious. The advice of management gurus varies from Tom Peters' "stick to the knitting", to Prahalad and Hamel's "leverage core competences". Businessmen as successful as Lord Hanson and Michael Eisner are moving in fundamentally different directions. Hanson, the prime exponent of an acquisition strategy, is demerging his company into three, while Eisner's $19 billion purchase of CapCities and its ABC television network is Disney's first ever major acquisition. Even the empirical evidence on the link between corporate strategy and performance is conflicting. Some research demonstrates that diversification leads to poor performance—Lang and Stulz, for example, find that firms which compete in more than one business segment are systematically valued at 30% less than those which compete in only one segment—while other research continues to show the validity of conglomeration. Anslinger and Cope-land, for example, could identify 21 firms whose non-synergistic acquisitions allowed them to earn sustained returns of 18-35% pa.