The three Porters generic competitive strategies are alternative, viable approaches to dealing with the competitive forces. The converse of the previous discussion is that the firm failing to develop its strategy in at least one of the three directions – a firm that is stuck in the middle – is in an extremely poor strategic situation. According to Porter, a company’s failure to make a choice between cost leadership and differentiation essentially implies that the company is stuck in the middle. Porter argued that cost leadership and differentiation are such fundamentally contradictory strategies, requiring such different sets of resources, that any ï¬rm attempting to combine them would wind up “stuck in the middle” and fail to enjoy superior performance, Cost leadership requires standardized products with few unique or distinctive features or services so that costs are kept to a minimum. On the other hand, differentiation usually depends on offering customers Continue reading
Strategic Management
Strategic management is the art and science of formulating, implementing and evaluating cross-functional decisions that will enable an organization to achieve its objectives. It involves the systematic identification of specifying the firm’s objectives, nurturing policies and strategies to achieve these objectives, and acquiring and making available these resources to implement the policies and strategies to achieve the firm’s objectives. Strategic management, therefore, integrates the activities of the various functional sectors of a business, such as marketing, sales, production etc. , to achieve organizational goals. It is generally the highest level of managerial activity, usually initiate by the board of directors and executed by the firm’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and executive team.
Analysis of Competitive Position Using Porter’s Five Forces Model
Michael Porter’s Five-Forces Model of competitive analysis is a widely used approach for developing strategies in many industries as the intensity of competition among firms varies widely across industries. According to Porter, the nature of competitiveness in an industry can be viewed as a composite of five forces: rivalry among competing firms, potential entry of new competitors, potential development of substitute products, bargaining power of suppliers and bargaining power of consumers. There are 3 steps to use Porter’s Five Forces Model can reveal whether competition in a given industry is such that the firm can make an acceptable profit. Firstly, identify key aspects or elements of each competitive force that impact the firm. Secondly, evaluate how strong and important each element is for the firm. Lastly, decide whether the collective strength of the elements is worth the firm entering or staying in the industry. Rivalry among the competing firms is Continue reading
The Growth of Strategic Planning
Many of today’s most successful business organizations continue to survive because many years ago they offered the right product at the right time; the same can be said for nonprofits and government organizations. Many critical decisions of the past were made without the benefit of strategic thinking or planning. Whether these decisions were based on wisdom or luck is not important. They resulted in momentum that has carried these organizations to where they are today. However, present day managers increasingly recognize that wisdom and intuition alone are not sufficient to guide the destinies of large organizations in today’s ever changing environment. These managers are turning to strategic planning. In earlier, less dynamic periods in our society, the planning system utilized by most organizations extrapolated current year sales and environmental trends for 5 and 10 years. Based on these, they made plant, product, and investment decisions. In most instances, the decisions Continue reading
Mintzberg’s Model of Organizational Structure
Management expert Henry Mintzberg proposed that traditionally organizations (profit making or not for profit) can be divided into five components. In practice organizational structure may differ from proposed model. Factors influencing organizational structure are industry norms, size, experience, culture, external forces (competition, inflation, minimum wage legislation etc). Components identified by Mintzberg is useful for understanding the workflow of organizations. The structure of an organization can be defined simply as the sum total of the ways in which it divides its labor into distinct tasks and then achieves coordination among them” – The Structuring of Organizations, Henry Mintzberg. 1. Strategic Apex Strategic apex is the most senior level in the organization. Management working at this level is referred as board of Directors (chairman, CEO, executes and non executive directors). They set the objectives (increase sales by 10% in one year) and strategic direction (new product and markets developments) of Continue reading
The SCP Framework – Structure Conduct Performance Framework
The origin of the SCP (Structure-Conduct-Performance) paradigm can be traced to the work of the Harvard economist Edward Mason in the 1930s. It was popularized during 1930-60 with its empirical work involving the identification of correlations between industry structure and performance. This is a paradigm that is foundational to industrial organization economics, consistent with the positional view of strategy, as opposed to the resource-based view of strategy. There are two competing hypotheses in the SCP paradigm: the traditional “structure performance hypothesis” and “efficient structure hypothesis”. The structure performance hypothesis states that the degree of market concentration is inversely related to the degree of competition. This is because market concentration encourages firms to collude. The efficiency structure hypothesis states that performance of the firm is positively related to its efficiency. This is because market concentration emerges from competition where firms with low cost structure increase profits by reducing prices and expanding Continue reading
Shell’s Directional Policy Matrix (DPM)
The Shell Directional Policy Matrix (DPM) is another refinement upon the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Matrix. Along the horizontal axis are prospects for business sector profitability, and along the vertical axis is a company’s competitive capability. Business sector profitability includes the size of the market, expected growth, lack of competition, profit margins within the market and other favorable political and socio-economic conditions. On the other hand company’s competitive capability is determined by the sales volume, the products reputation, reliability of service and competitive pricing. As with the GE Business Screen the location of a Strategic Business Unit (SBU) in any cell of the matrix implies different strategic decisions. However decisions often span options and in practice the zones are an irregular shape and do not tend to be accommodated by box shapes. Instead they blend into each other. Each of the zones in Shell’s Directional Policy Matrix is described as Continue reading