BUS 523 Chapter 6 Reflection

Chap 6 Corporate Strategies

Write a reflection about something you found interesting and post your reflection to the forum.

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Corporate Level strategy is an action taken to gain a competitive advantage through the selection and management of a mix of business competing in several industries or product markets.

Corporate strategy is what makes the corporate whole add up to more than the sum of its business unit parts.

The three broad approaches to corporate strategy are single business/concentration, vertical integration and diversification, which is divided into two broad categories, related and unrelated.

Evidence shows that unrelated diversification is associated with higher levels of risk than other strategies. Unrelated diversification places significant demands on corporate –level executives due to increased complexity and technological changes across industries.  However, large company like GE performs well in this strategy as they have skills and resources  to help its businesses overcome problems of unrelated business areas.

BUS 523 Chapter 5 Reflection

Chap 5 Business-Level Strategies

Write a reflection about something you found interesting and post your reflection to the forum.

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This chapter dealt with business-level strategy, which defines an organization’s approach to competing in its chosen markets.

The competitive strategies discussed in this chapter are cost leadership, differentiation, and best cost. In differentiation strategies the emphasis is on creating value through sustainable uniqueness. Uniqueness can be achieved through product innovations, superior quality, and superior service, then sustained and leveraged through creative advertising, brand-building, and strong supply chain relationships. For a differentiation strategy to succeed, customers must be willing to pay more for the uniqueness of a product or service than the firm paid to create it. If the costs are too high relative to competitor, a firm may be able to recover enough of these additional costs through higher prices. The only way a differentiation strategy will work is if buyers value the uniqueness to pay a higher price for it. If a firm is successful at differentiation of its products or services, it will quickly become the target of the imitative efforts of competitors.

BUS 523 Chapter 4 Reflection

Chap 4 Strategic Direction

Write a reflection about something you found interesting and post your reflection to the forum.

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Strategic direction is defined in terms of a firm’s vision of where it is heading, the business in which it is involved, and its purpose. To set and define strategic direction: 1) describe the most critical issues facing your organization; 2) write a statement, which describes your organization’s core competencies; 3) describe what you see as the longer-term vision of what your organization can become; 4) write your organization’s existing mission statement; 5) possible changes in mission statement for the future; 6) revised mission statement (the purpose of the organization). For practical purposes, a firm’s vision is often embedded in its mission statement. 7) Developing / updating vision statement (depiction of future state of organization and customers). 8) Developing/updating values statement (overall priorities in how organization operates).

BUS 523 Chapter 3 Reflection

Chap 3 Organizational Resources and Competitive Advantage

Write a reflection about something you found interesting and post your reflection to the forum.

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Human resources hold excellent potential for sustainable competitive advantage. Possible sources of advantage include excellent human resources, superior top managers, or an excellent system of corporate governances. Managers serve as agents for the shareholders. When they act in their own interests at the expense of the shareholders, an agency problem exists.

Agency problems happen in large companies like Novell Inc., Exxon Mobile, IBM and Time Warner. CEOs’ high salaries reduce the amount of earnings available to the shareholders. CEO compensation packages for the large US companies typically reach into the millions of dollars annually. Since research and development expenditures reduce current earnings and often do not provide financial benefits for many years, CEOs who are compensated based on profitability levels have a built-in incentive not to approve research projects.  Bad performance CEOs tend to use ‘reorganization’ or ‘restructuring’ of the company to cut thousands of jobs to show the ‘earnings’ of the company and hence get a big bonus.  I think this is very immoral.

BUS 523 Final Project 1

• Select a company you wish to analyze and write a short blog post about this company/business (Due 16 Oct)

The company to be analyzed is Apple Inc.

The main products are Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad and iTunes. It is a publicly held company, the stock symbol is AAPL. Steve Jobs is the Chief Executive Officer, Peter Oppenheimer is the Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Tim Cook is the Chief Operating Officer.

The Company competes in highly competitive global markets characterized by aggressive price cutting, with resulting downward pressure on gross margins, frequent introduction of new products, short product life cycles, evolving industry standards, continual improvement in product price/performance characteristics, rapid adoption of technological and product advancements by competitors, and price sensitivity on the part of consumers.

BUS 523 Week 1 Assignment 2

Read Ch1 and 2 Create a blog and list 3-5 ideas you've learned that you feel are most important to you and your career.

·         What is Strategic management?

Strategic management is the process through which organization analyze and learn from their internal and external environments, establish strategic direction, create strategies that are intended to help achieve established goals, and execute those strategies, all in an effort to satisfy key organizational stakeholders.

(1)    Internal  (Strengths, Weaknesses) and external (Opportunities, Threats) environments

-          the results from external and internal analysis are combined into a SWOT analysis

(2)    Strategic direction pertains to the longer-term goals and objectives of the organization. For example, “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

(3)    Strategy formulation is often divided into three levels – corporate, business, and functions.

(4)    Strategy implementation involves creating the functional strategies, systems, structures, and processes needed by the organization in achieving strategic ends. Good control also is critical to organizational success.

(5)    Strategic restructuring typically involves a renewed emphasis on the things an organization does well, combined with a variety of tactics to revitalize the organization and strengthen its competitive position.

·         Strategic Thinking is the term to describe the creative aspect of the strategic management process. It involves a focus on strategic intent, a long-term perspective, consideration of the past and the present, a total systems orientation, the ability to seize unanticipated opportunities, and a scientific approach. Organizations have to encourage strategic thinking and take advantage of it when it occurs.

·         Five Forces

Four out of Five forces are in the broad environment which is external to the company – Sociocultural forces, economic forces, technological forces and political/legal forces.

The ‘Competitive forces’ is in the task environment.

One important distinction between the task and the broad environments is that the task environment is subject to a high level of organizational influence, whereas the broad environment is not.

·         Global Business Environment

Significant changes in the global environment have created great opportunities for organizations willing to take a risk and wait patiently for returns. Currently, great opportunities for growth exist in many countries such as China and India.