Learning objectives
By the end you can:
- Run a corporate portfolio review: score a multi-business company on market attractiveness and economic return, classify each business as own, grow, fix, or exit, and defend the classification using economic profit (return − hurdle) × capital rather than a raw ROIC ranking alone, correctly distinguishing a value-destroying business with no path forward from a currently-loss-making one with a real growth option.
- Make and defend a build-versus-buy-versus-partner decision for a needed capability, using a structured framework (capability-gap size, urgency, cash cost, integration risk, reversibility, and whether the capability is or could become a moat) rather than fashion or imitation.
- Distinguish legal Day 1 from operational Day 1 and build a Day-1 readiness checklist across the legal, people, customer/supplier, and systems axes for a closing acquisition.
- Design a 100-day PMI plan with a governance structure (an Integration Management Office), a sequencing logic (quick wins vs. structural moves vs. people/culture), and a synergy tracker that separates timing misses from true leakage, and diagnose a real shortfall against a baseline, initiative by initiative.
- Explain what a Transition Services Agreement is for, price a TSA's cost and duration, and name the disciplines (a fixed exit date, cost-plus pricing, an owned accountability chain) that keep a bridge from becoming a permanent crutch.
- Plan a divestiture or carve-out at the advisory level, name the reasons a business gets sold, choose among a trade sale, a spin-off/demerger, and an equity carve-out/IPO, and identify stranded costs, separation costs, and the clean-team/clean-room discipline a competitively sensitive separation requires, while cross-linking, never re-deriving, the finance galaxy's valuation and spin-off mechanics.
- Choose an integration archetype on purpose (Absorption, Preservation, Symbiosis, or Holding) from the deal's strategic interdependence and organizational-autonomy needs, before close, and explain why the archetype decision is load-bearing for whether a synergy case can actually be realized.
- (Productivity, R10.) Use AI to accelerate synergy/precedent research and to draft first-pass PMI scaffolds (100-day plans, TSA schedules, synergy trackers), while tracing every figure to a primary source and owning every judgment call yourself.
Prerequisites & connections
Builds on. CN6.01 (Deal Rationale, Synergies & Their Traps) is this module's direct predecessor and is not re-taught here: CN6.01 built and stress-tested a synergy case (double-counting, dis-synergies, timing, cost-to-achieve) and priced the value of control from the advisory seat. This module assumes a signed deal (or a diagnosed exit) walks in the door and asks the next question, how do you make it real, or how do you get out. CN3.02 (Corporate, Growth & Customer Frameworks) taught the BCG growth-share matrix at the business-unit level; this module reuses the same growth-versus-position logic but elevates it to the corporate parent's capital-allocation seat, a different question ("should we, the parent, keep funding this?") asked with the same two axes. From the Finance galaxy: M2.03 (Returns on Capital Done Right) supplies the ROIC-versus-hurdle spread and the economic-profit arithmetic ((return − hurdle) × capital) this module uses on every business unit without re-deriving it. M4.01–M4.02 (business-model anatomy, unit economics) and M4.03–M4.05 (Porter, value chains, the five moat sources, 7 Powers) supply the competitive-position judgment behind "strong" or "weak" in the portfolio grid and the skepticism behind any claim that an acquired capability is a real moat rather than a rentable commodity. M3.09 (DCF/comps/LBO/M&A basics) and E11.02 (M&A, Deals & Special Situations Lab) own the modeling: sources & uses, accretion/dilution, the synergy present-value discipline, and the full taxonomy of separation vehicles (spin-off/demerger, equity carve-out, split-off, tracking stock) with the Indian scheme-of-arrangement mechanics. M3.10 §4.6 owns the valuation of a conglomerate discount (sum-of-the-parts, India's holding-company discount and its five causes). This module never re-derives any of that math; it teaches the advisory judgment layered on top, when to recommend a separation, which vehicle, and how to actually execute the operational split, none of which a valuation module covers. E11.03 (The Consulting Case-Interview Lab), the Cycle-2 taster, includes a worked M&A synergy/value-of-control example (Meghna Cement) that is this whole branch's on-ramp; if that felt interesting, this is the deep treatment.