Thirty Years After Michael E. Porter: What Do We Know About Business Exit?

Abstract

Executive OverviewAlthough a business exit is an important corporate change initiative, the buyer's side seems to be more appealing to management researchers than the seller's because acquisitions imply growth, i.e., success. Yet from an optimistic viewpoint, business exit can effectively create value for the selling company. In this paper we attempt to bring the relevance of the seller's side back into our consciousness by asking: What do we know about business exit? We start our exploration with Porter (1976), focusing on literature that investigates the antecedents of, barriers to, and outcomes of business exit. We also include studies from related fields such as finance and economics. 1 Through this research we determine three clusters of findings: factors promoting business exit, exit barriers, and exit outcomes. Overall, it is the intention of this paper to highlight the importance of business exit for research and practice. Knowing what we know about business exits and their high financial value we should bear in mind that exit need not mean failure but a new beginning for a corporation.B usiness exit is an asset restructuring activity involving a diversified firm's divestiture of one of its businesses, such as Intel's abandonment of its DRAM business (Burgelman, 1996). Interest in this topic can be traced back to publications that represent milestones in economic research such as Bain (1956), who established the concept of barriers to entry, Caves ' (1964) analysis of the American industry, and the seminal article on exit barriers by Porter published in California Management Review in 1976, which helped raise the interest in business exit among a broad audience. Data from the U.S. illustrate that business exit continues to be relevant (cf. Figure 1). In the U.S., business services, real estate, and software were the most active divesting industries in 2005. A recent study by the consulting company Accenture highlights the growing relevance of business exits for years to come and predicts that " [f]or the next years, many companies will give far more thought to divestitures than they did in the late 1990s" (Anslinger, Jenk, & Chanmugam, 2003).Although a business exit is an important corporate change initiative, the buyer's side seems to be more appealing to management researchers than the seller's because acquisitions imply growth, i.e., success. This preference for the "success" side can be seen at the industry level as well. Managers, for example, may resist business exit because it is afflicted with the stigma of failure and is often seen as a result of poor corporate management. The reluctance of managers to admit that their organization or at least parts of it are in trouble is evidence of their substantial personal preoccupation with growth and their large personal costs in case of exit (Gilson, 1989). Yet from an optimistic point of view, business exit can effectively create value for the selling company. Indeed, the stigma certainly wasn't a factor for former GE CEO Jack Welch. Under his leadersh...

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