Strategy for the Corporate Level: Where to Invest, What to Cut Back and How to Grow Organisations with Multiple Divisions, 2nd Edition

Chapter Fifteen Encouraging Synergy and Cooperation across Business Divisions

In Chapter 8, we described ways in which headquarters can generate synergy by promoting certain types of horizontal coordination. This chapter is about the difficult task of getting the coordination to work: getting managers in different business divisions to work together rather than avoid each other.

We devote a chapter especially to the management of synergy because it is something that many companies feel they do badly. When we researched this topic, we found very few management teams who responded “Ah yes, synergy. We do this quite well in our company. We get a lot of collaboration between our business divisions without much tension or negative consequences.” ...