As a company diversifies its activities, the task of capital allocation tends to emerge as the central function of the corporate CEO—the heart of strategic decision making in a multibusiness enterprise. Resource allocation or portfolio decisions arise because of the need to maximize overall results by managing a collection of relatively independent operating units or product lines as a single portfolio. This means setting earnings targets and making investment decisions for any one division (or product line) within a framework that encompasses the whole enterprise. Of course, it can be argued that portfolio management is not a required function in a multibusiness company, since the pieces can simply be allowed to operate independently. But by that reasoning, a corporate-management team is equally unnecessary, since if all the parts operate independently, there is no “value added” at the corporate or holding-company level.
Too often, companies actually undermine their strategic-planning programs by approaching major capital-deployment decisions purely on a traditional capital-budgeting basis. That is, in principle all requests for capital funds are filled no matter what division or product line they come from, provided only that they clear a single financial hurdle such as a payback or discounted cash-flow rate of return. Of course, when the requests exceed the available resources, some ranking system is employed, but, in effect, the hurdle is simply raised and a new single-number decision rule is applied uniformly to all requests.