Group management

Group management is an area of business administration and includes all managerial issues and tasks that arise specifically in corporations .

In addition to legally prescribed sovereign tasks at group level, such as group accounting , the group level formulates a corporate strategy and designs the corporate governance systems of the group.

These creative tasks pursue the objective of generating company value, which is only made possible through the association of the individual parts of the group and the existence of the group headquarters and its activities. If a group does not succeed in creating such added value and the majority of its ownership rights are traded on the capital market, the company is valued at a value deduction, a so-called corporate discount, and broken up by capital market players in the medium term. That the capital market acts as a market for corporate control follows from considerations of portfolio theory .

With regard to the basic approaches to generating value through corporate management, three ideal types of companies can be distinguished: (1) The portfolio optimizer (e.g. Berkshire Hathaway from Warren Buffett ), (2) the vertical optimizer (e.g. Continental AG ) and (3) the horizontal optimizer (e.g. UBS AG ). Each of these three dimensions of value generation expressed in the ideal types are associated with specific structures and capabilities at the group level.

In general, the following are important areas of corporate management:

• the overall corporate strategy
• the Corporate Governance , as well as the risk management
• the portfolio management by acquisitions and disposals of assets
• the corporate finance .

The St. Gallen corporate management model represents an approach to organize the numerous subtasks of group management and systematically identify value generation levers .

literature

• Grinblatt, Mark; Titman, Sheridan: Financial Markets And Corporate Strategy . Irwin / McGraw-Hill, Boston et al., 1998. ISBN 0-256-09939-1
• Milgrom, Paul; Roberts, John: Economics, Organization and Management . Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1992. ISBN 0-13-223967-1
• Mueller-Stewens G, Brauer M .: Corporate Strategy & Governance: Ways to sustainable increase in value in diversified companies . Schäffer-Poeschel, Stuttgart, 2010. ISBN 3-791-02854-5
• Scheffler, Eberhard: Group management . 2nd edition, Vahlen 2005. ISBN 3-800-63097-4
• Ringlstetter, Max ; Klein, Benjamin: "Corporate Management" Stuttgart 2010. ISBN 978-3-17-019521-9