Corporate Strategizing: Building the Group Without Busting the Businesses

This thesis expands the strategy literature of corporate strategy, strategizing, and strategy as process and practice by providing insights into a real-life challenge encountered by a global dominant player in the engineering, construction, and real estate industry. This challenge was voiced as: “How can we align the group of businesses to leverage our group’s size and diversity without limiting the individual businesses’ responsiveness?”

Corporate and business strategy alignment could be seen as a balancing act. This balance aimed at enabling corporate synergies by utilizing the size and diversity of a multi-business firm without limiting the responsiveness of the incorporated businesses. In strategizing, this balance had to be continuously managed. Participation in strategizing influenced the balance and afforded ownership of strategies to the businesses, facilitating learning and subsequently firm-specific knowledge, which could then generate synergies. Employing strategy tools in corporate strategizing facilitated a common language as the tools chosen prescribed the outcome format by defining critical concepts used in strategizing. Tools also facilitated comparison and learning from the group perspective. The strategy professionals managing and facilitating of the strategizing process and practices resulted in synergies through common ways of strategizing while still allowing business managers their own strategy agendas.

Aligning corporate and business strategy in terms of process and practices resulted in cost and growth synergies for the corporation without significantly limiting the businesses’ responsiveness while content alignment primarily results in cost synergies and limited business responsiveness.

The findings of this study contribute to the corporate strategy literature, strategizing theory, and the strategy as process and practice research stream by explaining how multi-business firms strategize and how different firms’ approaches to strategizing manage the balance of corporate and business strategy alignment in a variety of ways. By highlighting and combining the process and practice perspectives with corporate strategy, understanding of the domains, both collectively and individually, is increased.

The findings of the study provide insights into how multi-business firms can enable corporate synergies without limiting the incorporated businesses’ responsiveness. However, organizations may have different levels of ambition regarding synergies, and consequently have different approaches regarding how to manage the balance of corporate and business strategy alignment. Recommendations as to how participation, strategy tools, and strategy professionals can be used in the organizations’ strategizing are offered.

Find the thesis at KTH Royal Institute of Technology's database