Corporate Strategy

The book I read to research this post was Exploring Corporate Strategy by Gerry Johnson et al which is a very good book which I bought from a car boot sale. This book which is the 2nd edition was published in 1988 and much of the information in the book is probably a bit out of date not to mention corporate strategy has changed since but it's still an interesting book. Much of corporate strategy is about the demographics of your average customer and how your business responds to market conditions. Often has a company has to respond to competition from other companies it has to either downsize considerably or expand to meet the extra demand. If your competition expands and takes more of the market you risk being edged out. A mistake a lot of big companies make is buying a company that is in an unrelated field. This can waste resources especially if they don't how the new companies works within its marketplace. It can be they buy a company in a field in a related field but the company appeals to a different. Also often a successful company will go public on the stock exchange to get funds for expansion but the people in charge may find they are losing at least partial control of the company. In Britain there was a small baby boom in the 90's but on the whole the population is ageing benefiting companies with an aging demographic of average customer. A company that appeals to younger people for example may find they must downsize or look to other markets. If a company only sells to certain markets they risk reaching a saturation point where further expansion is limited. A problem with the book is that the examples it has are obviously from years ago but it is well written and I enjoyed reading it.