Developing Your Enterprise Selection Capability: Balancing Build, Borrow, and Buy Decisions Across Your Organization

Chapter 7 of "Build, Borrow, or Buy: Solving the Growth Dilemma" explains how to create an organizational capability around the decision to build, borrow, or buy the resources your firm needs in order to grow. The chapter lays out a process for managing your organization's resources by bringing the topics discussed in the rest of the book together into a repeatable framework that can be applied across your organization indefinitely. The authors use networking giant Cisco Systems to illustrate how expert leadership and the skillful use of all three growth pathways can create a powerful, enterprise-wide discipline--strategically coordinated building, borrowing, and buying. *About the book:* How should you grow your organization? It's one of the most challenging questions an executive team faces--and the wrong answer can break your firm. The problem is, most firms' strategies emphasize just one type of growth--for example, some focus on organic growth, others on M&A. When these strategies falter, the common response is simply to try harder. Instead, firms need to find the pathway that is right for them, argue INSEAD's Laurence Capron and coauthor Will Mitchell, of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. The result of a decade of research and teaching, their "resource pathways framework" helps organizations find that path. It is built around three strategic questions: (1) BUILD: Are your existing internal resources relevant for developing the new resources that you have targeted for growth? (2) BORROW: Could you obtain the targeted resources via an effective relationship with a resource partner? and (3) BUY: Do you need broad and deep relationships with your resource provider? Written for managers of large multinationals and emerging firms alike, "Build, Borrow, or Buy" will help solve a perennial question and guide you through change, while priming your organization for optimal growth.