توجه به سهام هم افزایی: چارچوب برای ارزیابی ارتباط بین کسب و کار

This article provides a framework for companies that wish to conduct an audit of how well their approach to synergy management is working. The framework, which has been used successfully by several companies, provides a practical and systematic way of pinpointing unrealized opportunities and creating an agenda of initiatives for addressing them. A detailed illustrative example shows how the framework was used in a specific company. “Are we doing all we could to promote synergies across the businesses we own?” Whether the synergies are between different local units within a multinational enterprise or different businesses in a diversified group, this is a question that we have found more and more chief executives and senior managers are anxious to address. After a decade during which many companies de-emphasised synergy, in the belief that a clear focus on individual business performance paid off better, the pressure to make two and two add up to more than four is back. Management experts from Michael Porter to Sumantra Ghoshal1 claim that corporate strategies that do not stress synergy are out of date and hard to justify. Investors press for the break-up of groups in which there are no evident synergies between the constituent parts.2 Business managers grumble if they feel that they are getting too little help in achieving their targets from their sister units. As a result, corporate managers are increasingly concerned about the quality of synergy management in their companies. But a vague sense that synergy opportunities are being missed is not actionable. And a generalised campaign to invest more time and effort in synergies is usually wasteful, counterproductive and frustrating. What is needed is a means of taking stock of how well the current approach to synergy is working, from which senior management can draw up an action agenda of specific initiatives that are worth considering. Based on ten years of research and consulting on synergy issues,3 we have devised a new framework for conducting such a review. The framework provides a systematic but practical and time-effective means of auditing synergy management, and has been used to good effect by several companies, including one which we describe in detail in this article.