Corporations strive to achieve one of these three "ideal" portfolios, whose objectives, goals, and required resource levels are different, and lead the corporation to different future scenarios. A growth portfolio has many business units at the early stages of the life cycle. Its goals emphasize the long term, and it may run into cash-flow problems in the short term. A profit portfolio has many business units in the mature stage, and profit is a short-term goal. This type of portfolio may encounter problems in the future, when the product-markets begin to decline. A balanced portfolio has, as its name implies, a balanced mix of business units at all stages. In all three of these "ideal" portfolios the business units are strong compared to the competition. An ideal portfolio does not include average or weak business units.
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The exact circumstances of my stepping on a beehive are debatable. I clearly remember I took a shortcut home through the neighbors’ yard. My mother claims a bunch of angry kids were after me. Maybe. Anyhow, my mother carried me on her back to the nearest clinic. I was seven or eight years old, small and fat. This time it was an easy task for my mother, since a year earlier she had carried me back home with a cast on my leg. The physician counted 29 different bee stings on my back and head. Some of them were very easy to find since the dead bees were trapped in my hair, others were inside my shirt. The physician told my mother that 29 bee stings, for my size, was a borderline case. A few more would probably have killed me. Even without the sedatives I was high. I truly can not report any vision, but everything was very relaxed, highly illuminated, and blurred around the corners. Maybe it was mid-summer; maybe I was unable to focus my eyes. However, as an active avoider of uncertainty, and a practicing risk averter, I missed all the drug parties of the sixties, or of any other decade. Maybe I was always afraid of the thirtieth bee sting.
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There should be a clear distinction between the corporate and business levels. A topdown approach for analyzing multi-industry organizations should be used. The first step is to establish the desired corporate portfolio profile. The next step is the formulation of specific business strategies for the separate business units. Afterwards, any gaps existing between corporate and business unit level strategies are closed through consultation between managers at the two levels.
Corporate portfolio strategies are analogous to business unit strategies: how to meet the corporate goals, while allocating limited resources. There are other actions that may be taken apart from changing the portfolio strategy, such as:
changing the resource-procurement strategy, changing the political strategy, or changing the corporate goals.
Thus, the portfolio may be balanced by achieving one of the ideal portfolios in the following manner:
• Invest in newly evolving business units so that they can secure strong competitive positions in the future.
• Invest in average or weak business units in order to nurture them into strong competitive positions. Resource constraints will determine how many such business units the corporation can afford to cultivate.
• Harvest very weak business units in growth markets that are unlikely to attain strong positions in the future, weak business units in saturated or declining markets that are producing negative cash flows, and business units that are so different from the other business units in the corporation that top management cannot manage them effectively.
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