INSEAD Professor’s new book provides a guide to decision-making in corporate strategy domain

Wednesday, 4 May 2016 13:41 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

INSEAD, the leading international business school, has announced the publication of a new book, ‘Corporate Strategy: Tools for Analysis and Decision-Making’. The book, co-authored by INSEAD Professor of Strategy Phanish Puranam and Professor Bart Vanneste from UCL School of Management, provides corporate strategists with the tools needed to understand the alternatives that lie behind major strategic choices. Based on over two decades of research and teaching in the world’s leading business schools, ‘Corporate Strategy: Tools for Analysis and Decision-Making’ modernises the typical textbook format by focusing on decisions, rather than theories.

The authors tackle the big decisions that determine whether multi-business companies thrive or falter. These include the choice between retaining or divesting businesses, inorganic or organic growth, mergers/acquisitions or alliances, and directive or evaluative control by headquarters. “Too often, corporate strategists are led by their professional advisers into the consideration of a particular industry, acquisition target, or alliance partner, as vital to their growth plans. It’s a bit like facing the magician who forces you to pick the card he wants you to pick. Strategists – by which we mean CEO’s and their staff – must know how to take a sophisticated look at the roads not taken. By asking the right questions, they must figure out if there were indeed good reasons for avoiding them.” says Phanish Puranam, the Roland Berger Chaired Professor of Strategy and Organisation Design and Academic Director of the PhD Programme at INSEAD. “Decisions about corporate strategy are some of the most – if not the most – consequential decisions that CEOs of multi-business firms can take,” says Bart Vanneste, Associate Professor in Strategy at UCL School of Management. “Since the competition for the CEO is a mutual fund manager who can assemble similar portfolio of businesses, the only way to survive in today’s markets is for a CEO to get the corporate strategy right. Making sure that individual businesses do well, is quite often not enough.”

The book combines the latest thinking on designing organisations with corporate finance – both key ingredients for a corporate strategist, but which rarely appear together in contemporary books on the topic. By showing corporate strategists how to break down and analyse complex decisions, the authors aim to help improve the quality of corporate strategy choices, show observers how to analyse them and guide students towards understanding them. As one of the world’s leading and largest graduate business schools, INSEAD offers participants a truly global educational experience. With campuses in Europe (France), Asia (Singapore) and Middle East (Abu Dhabi), INSEAD’s business education and research spans three continents. Its 148 renowned faculty members from 40 countries inspire more than 1,300 students in its degree and PhD programmes. In addition, more than 9,500 executives participate in INSEAD’s executive education programmes each year. In 2016, all three of IN SEAD ’s MBA programmes are ranked #1 by the Financial Times in their categories: MBA, Single School Executive MBA, and the Tsinghua-INSEAD Executive MBA.