Corporate and business unit strategy

Business unit strategy

PA’s approach to defining business unit strategies which really create value is based on four key features:

• For any given management team, there are a small number of key strategic uncertainties – on which attention should be focused
• Any successful strategy has to identify an attractive market
• Any successful strategy has to identify a source of real, differentiated, competitive advantage
• The value-creation must be clearly demonstrable.

This highly-structured, transparent approach provides real confidence to management teams, and prevents them being swept along by industry ‘received wisdom’ into making ill-considered and value-destroying investments.

One PA client used this approach to completely reverse its ‘one-stop-shop’ strategy, focusing instead on ‘profitable, quality products and services’. The new strategy showed where to target growth and how to increase value by a factor of two over five years.

See also:

Corporate strategy

Managing for Shareholder Value

Prudential Retail (case study)