波士顿矩阵与GE矩阵的优缺点

BCG Matrix

Advantages:

Enables management assesses the organization’s present/future potential

Enables management to assess the strength of a company

Provides a good basis for the formulation of marketing objectives for specific international markets

Disadvantages:

Can not give guidance on the relative merits of any claim on resources.

Is a rigid framework and has no adaptability

The relation between market share and profitability is questionable.

GE Matrix

Advantages

It used 9 cells instead of 4 cells of BCG

It considers many variables and does not lead to simplistic conclusions

It uses multiple factors to assess industry attractiveness and business strength, which allow users to select criteria appropriate to their situation

Disadvantages

It can get quite complicated and cumbersome with the increase in businesses

It cannot effectively depict the position of new business units in developing industry

It only provides broad strategic prescriptions rather than specifics of business policy

How is corporate parenting different from portfolio analysis? How is it alike?

The basic difference between these two approaches to corporate strategy lies in the questions they attempt to answer. According to the text, portfolio analysis attempts to answer the following two questions:

•How much of our time and money should we spend on our best products and business units in order to ensure that they continue to be successful?

•How much of our time and money should we spend developing new costly products, most of which will never be successful?

The basic theme of portfolio analysis its emphasis on cash flow. Portfolio analysis puts corporate headquarters into the role of an internal banker. In portfolio analysis, top management views its product lines and business units as a series of investments from which it expects to get a profitable return. The product lines/business units form a portfolio of investments which top management must constantly juggle to ensure the best return on the corporation's invested money.

Corporate parenting attempts to answer two similar, but different questions: •What businesses should this company own and why?

•What organizational structure, management processes, and philosophy will foster superior performance from the company's business units?

Portfolio analysis attempts to answer these questions by examining the attractiveness of

various industries and by managing business units for cash flow, that is, by using cash generated from mature units to build new product lines. Unfortunately, portfolio analysis fails to deal with the question of what industries a corporation should enter or with how a corporation can attain synergy among its product lines and business units. As suggested by its name, portfolio analysis tends to primarily take a financial point of view and views business units and product lines as if they were separate and independent investments. Corporate parenting, in contrast, views the corporation in terms of resources and capabilities that can be used to build business unit value as well as generate synergies across business units. The central job of corporate headquarters is not to be a banker, but to coordinate diverse units to achieve synergy. This is especially important in a global industry in which a corporation must manage interrelated business units for global advantage. Corporate parenting is similar to portfolio analysis in that it attempts to manage a set of diverse product lines/business units to achieve better overall corporate performance.