Corporate Strategy Overview
Corporate strategy decides which businesses a company should be in, how it helps those businesses win, and where it commits resources. It gives corporate development a reason to buy, build, partner, or sell. Start by agreeing the customer advantage you want to create before choosing a transaction.
This section introduces strategy work from Roger Martin, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and McKinsey & Company. The guides connect their frameworks to practical decisions for strategy and corporate development teams. Worked examples and workshop templates are original, hypothetical applications; they do not imply endorsement by the authors or firms.
Start with Playing to Win
Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley's Playing to Win organizes strategy around five connected choices: ambition, markets, advantage, capabilities, and management systems. Read the Playing to Win guide for the full cascade and a worked corporate development example. The framework is introduced in Martin's Playing to Win practitioner series.
The featured HBR video, A Plan Is Not a Strategy, asks leaders to distinguish activities from a theory of competitive success. Watch it before the leadership team reviews its next strategy deck.
Separate the three decisions
Keep the corporate decision, the business decision, and the transaction decision connected. Give each one a clear owner.
| Decision | Question to answer | Useful work product |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate strategy | Which businesses belong together, and what can this parent help them achieve? | Portfolio choices and capital priorities, owned by the CEO and leadership team |
| Business strategy | Which customers will this business serve, and why will they choose it? | Market choices and a defensible customer advantage, owned by the business leader |
| Corporate development | Which gaps should we close through buying, partnering, investing, or selling? | A mandate with alternatives, boundaries, and an operating sponsor |
A shared customer list does not prove two businesses belong together. Explain the specific benefit of common ownership and the cost of achieving it. Ask whether the same benefit could come from a contract.
Choose the framework for the question
Use each framework for a defined decision. The following sequence is this guide's suggested workflow, rather than a combined methodology from the publishers.
| Your question | Start here | Bring to the discussion |
|---|---|---|
| Where will we compete, and why will we win? | Roger Martin: Playing to Win | Customer evidence, competing alternatives, capability gaps |
| What approach suits each market? | BCG: strategy palette | Evidence about uncertainty, influence, and financial pressure |
| How should the portfolio fund itself? | BCG: growth-share matrix | Consistent market definitions, relative share, cash needs |
| Are we developing the next growth engines? | McKinsey: three horizons | Core performance, emerging businesses, experiments |
| Which businesses deserve more investment? | GE–McKinsey: nine-box matrix | Industry evidence, competitive strength, investment alternatives |
| How do we turn analysis into decisions? | Run a corporate strategy workshop | Options, unresolved assumptions, proposed commitments |
Work from a customer problem
Consider a hypothetical industrial software group. Its products help factories schedule maintenance. Customers say equipment failures still interrupt production because the software cannot diagnose faults.
Management considers three paths. It could expand scheduling into new countries, add diagnostic capabilities for existing customers, or offer outsourced maintenance. Each path serves a different need and requires different skills.
The team chooses diagnostics for existing manufacturing customers. Its proposed advantage is a single workflow from fault detection to a scheduled repair. It excludes operating maintenance crews. That choice narrows the acquisition search and creates specific questions for customer research.
The portfolio review then asks which existing businesses can fund this direction. The growth review asks what to test before scaling it. CorpDev compares internal development, a diagnostic partner, and a specialist acquisition against the same customer outcome.
Take the choices into the business
- Start with Roger Martin's Playing to Win.
- Prepare a corporate strategy workshop.
- Turn the approved direction into an M&A strategy.
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