CORPORATE ENTERPRISE STRATEGY
Peter Drucker and other management consultants and theorists used to argue that the most important question for managers to ask was: What's your business? The emphasis on clearly defining what business an organization was in captured the creative and intellectual imagination of an entire generation of management thinkers. The literature of the field is filled with stories about consultants who made a fortune by offering insights such as, “You aren’t in the tin can business, You are in the packaging business.”
But another question lurks at the heart of strategic management decisions: What do you stand for? This question calls for a statement of values and principles, for an answer to questions about why a company does what it does. The critic who asks, “Why did AT&T agree to divest the Bell operating companies?” may want to know what options were available to AT&T, but it is even more likely that the critic wants to know what values and principles lay behind AT&T’s decision. Drucker and others call such a statement of values and principles enterprise strategy (E-Strategy for short).
At least seven different enterprise strategies have been identified:
1. Stockholder E-Strategy: The corporation should maximize the interests of stockholders