The power of strategic integration

All multibusiness corporations face the strategic imperitive imposed by the stock market: maximizing the profitable growth of their businesses, Long-term success in meeting that imperative requires developing new stategy-making capabilities. During the early 1990s, many multibusiness companies focused on improving profitability through operational integration, The reengineered, focusing on the capabilities that would improve speed, quality and efficiency- and pruning business activities that no longer fit the value-creation logic of the corporate strategy. Then, starting in the late 1990s, senior managers began to focus on integrating strategies to add to revenue growth. Strategic integration involves more fully exploiting growth potential by combining resources and competencies from business units and directing those units toward new business opportunities that extend the existing corporate strategy.(1) Today leaders of multibusiness corporations are learning to identify the maximum-strategic-opportunity set - those opportunities that can let companies take the fullest advantage of their capabilities and their potential to pursue new strategies. But to exploit those opportunities, managers need to become accomplished at what we call complex strategic integration (CSI). (See "About the Research.").