For example, as the vice president of marketing for a major cable television operator, my marketing plan relied on our engineering division making major upgrades to our cable systems.

FORBES: How to Write a Plan or Proposal That Rocks

Telefonica, the Spanish mobile phone operator and owner of O2, is launching a new division to sell information about its customers.

BBC: Telefonica hopes 'big data' arm will revive fortunes

He had built North Star Steel, a division of privately held Cargill, into the second-biggest minimill operator behind Nucor Corp. (a minimill starts with scrap rather than ore).

FORBES: Iron Wills

For Telefonica of Spain and France Telecom , that means more regulatory headaches, but for BT Group, which sold its cellphone division to its Spanish rival in 2005, being a purely fixed line operator suddenly seems much more attractive.

FORBES: BT Stands Out

Turnover and profits at bus and rail operator FirstGroup were boosted by increased ticket sales at both its UK rail and US Greyhound bus division.

BBC: Increase in FirstGroup profits

At TNT, a Dutch postal operator, shareholders won a battle to get the firm to separate its express business from its mail division, but the company added unpopular anti-takeover mechanisms to the express part.

ECONOMIST: European corporate governance