Managing a waning asset and searching for growth: How FB is balancing it

One of the toughest corporate strategies is managing a declining asset while investing in promising but nascent ones.

It’s such a well-known difficulty that famous books have been written about it. This management balancing act might be even tougher in technology. If a company has a slow-growing or declining tech asset, often it simply dies or gets taken over by a private equity firm.

It does seem, however, that Facebook Inc. is smartly managing one probably waning asset — its main social network — while it is building up assets such as Instagram and the “stories” format of personal visual diaries.