What kind of businesses should we be in? What should be the scope of activity in the future so what should we divest and what should we seek to add? What stnicture, systems and processes will be necessary to link the various businesses to each other and to the corporate centre? How can the corporate centre add value to make the whole worth more than the sum of the parts? Aprimary approach to corporate level strategy is diversication, which requires the top-level executives to cra a multibusiness strategy. In fact, one reason for the use of a diversication strategy is that managers of diversied firms possess unique management skills that can be used to develop multihusiness strategies and enhance a firm's competitiveness (Collins and Montgomery, 1998). Most corporate level strategies have three major components: a) 13) Growth or directional strategy. outlines the growth objectives ranging from drastic retrenchment through stability to varying degrees of growth and methods and approaches to accomplish these objectives. Corporations are responsible for creating value through their businesses. They do so by using a portfolio strategy to manage their portfolio of businesses, ensure that the businesses are successful over the long-term. develop business units, and ensure that each business is compatible with others in the portfolio. Portfolio strategy plans the necessary moves to establish positions in different businesses and achieve an appropriate amount and kind of diversication. Portfolio strategy is an important component of corporate strategy in a multibusiness corporation. The top management views its product lines and business unit as a portfolio of investments from which it expects a protable return. A key part of corporate strategy is making decisions on how many, what types, and which specific lines ofbusiness the company should be in. This may involve decisions to increase or decrease the breadth of diversication by closing out some lines of business, adding others, and changing emphasis among the portfolio ofbusinesses. A portfolio strategy is concerned not only about choice of business portfolio, but also about portfolio of geographical markets for acquisition of inputs, locating various value chain activities and selling of outputs. In short, a portfolio strategy facilitates efcient allocation of corporate resources, links the businesses and geographically dispersed activities and builds synergy leading to corporate or parenting advantage. Corporate parenting strategy, which tries to capture valuable cross-business strategic ts in a portfolio of business and turn them into competitive advantages, especially transferring and sharing related technology, procurement leverage, operating facilities, distribution channels, and/or customers. In other words, it decides how we allocate resources and manage capabilities and activities across the portfolio 7 Where do we put special emphasis, and how much do we integrate our various lines of busines Corporate parenting views the corporation in terms of resources and capabilities that can be used to build business units value as well as generate synergies across business units. Corporate parenting generates corporate strategy by focusing on the core competencies ofthe parent corporation and on the value create from the relationship between the parent and its businesses. To achieve corporate parenting advantage a corporation needs to do at least the following. 1 Better choice of business to compete. 1 Superior acquisition and development of corporate resources. 1 Effective deployment, monitoring and controlling of corporate resources. 1 Sharing and transferring of resources from one business to other leading to umprov Growth Strategies-l