Background on the History of Enron Enron was an American Gas Company that was originally called Natural Gas Company in the early 1930s. InterNorth was a holding company that was located in Nebraska and in 1979 purchased Natural Gas Company. In 1985, Enron was born following the merger of InterNorth and Houston Natural Gas. Following the merger, in 1987 Enron discovered that oil traders in New York have overextended the company’s account by $1 billion dollars, which they were able to work down to $142 million. This put Enron in massive debt. For the new company to survive, Enron needed new, innovative, and strategic business plans to generate profits and improve cash flows. In 1988 Enron opened its first overseas office in England. “Come to Jesus” was a gathering by the top heads at Enron to come up with a new strategy to get the company out of debt and Continue reading
Business Analysis Case
Case Study: Euro Disney Failure – Failed Americanism?
Many of Businesses in America make detailed assumptions about the potential of expand their business to other countries and structural models of organizing which can be easily failed to consider the cultural differences. One of the examples of the outcome to intercultural business is Disney Corporation’s European venture. Due to lack of cultural information of France as well as Europe, further on their inability to forecast problems, Disney acquired a huge debt. False assumptions led to a great loss of time, money and even reputation for corporation itself. Instead of analyzing and learning from its potential visitors, Disney chose to make assumptions about the preference of Europeans, which turned out that most of those assumptions were wrong. Euro Disney Disaster Until 1992, the Walt Disney Company had experienced nothing but success in the theme park business. Its first park, Disneyland, opened in Anaheim, California, in 1955. Its theme song, “It’s Continue reading
Marketing Strategy of Sony Corporation
Strategic management decisions have multifunctional and multi-business consequences, this kind of decision require broad consideration of the firm’s external and internal environments, and it may affect the firm’s chance of prosperity. It is important to know what strategy is about, what can it do help the company prosper, what will happen if not used properly, what are the advantages and disadvantages of having a strategy. Strategy is a plan that assimilates the company’s major target; policies and rules; decisions and sequences of action into organized whole. Strategy is a combination of the company’s objectives, policies and decisions to be done in unison or contingent upon each other. Marketing strategy thus refers to how a company’s products or services its trade is presented to consumers in an effective manner as to gain loyal customers. Strategy can be used in different ways, one of which is through marketing. Using strategy in marketing Continue reading
Becoming a Successful Learning Organisation: Case Study of Apple
When faced with the challenges and difficulties in business environment nowadays, business need to improve knowledge continuously to survive and remain competitive with other business. Meanwhile, “learning organization” and “best practices” are two important concepts that can help businesses succeed. From an unknown organization has now become a famous brand with business strategy, the way in breaking success, Apple is one of the business organization encourages continuous personal learning to be able to overcome difficulties in the market today. We should study how organizations learn and practice such as Apple to see the strategic vision and ways of doing business that many companies in the world by surprise. How does Apple become a Learning Organization? Learning organization is one that sought to create their own future, said that learning is a continuous process and innovation for its members, and one in which the development, adaptation, and transform itself to meet Continue reading
Case Study: Google’s Competitive Advantage
The rise of Google, now a $6.1 billion company, has been fast and fierce. Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met in 1995 as Stanford University graduate students. They created a search engine that combined the technologies of Page’s PageRank system, which evaluates a page’s importance based on the external links to it, and Brin’s Web crawler, which visits Web sites and records a summary of their content. Because Google was so effective, it quickly became the search engine of choice for Web users. Today, Google handles nearly 50 percent of Web searches. Google stopped displaying the number of Web pages it indexed after the number surpassed 8 billion in 2005, but some estimates now place the number at 25 billion. Google’s index also includes one billion images and one billion Usenet newsgroup messages. In addition to searching for Web pages, Google users can search for PDF, PostScript, text, Microsoft Continue reading
Case Study: Kellogg’s Business Strategy
Kellogg’s is the world’s largest cereal maker since 1906 and is located in the United States. Kellogg’s products has become a part of the delicious mornings for the people around the world since a century. Its business is operated in two segments: Kellogg’s North America and Kellogg’s International. 66% of the revenue to the company comes from North America region which consists of the Canada and the United States. The remaining 34% comes from the Kellogg’s international market which consists of Europe (20%), Latin America (8%) and Asia Pacific (6%). The products vary from ready-to-eat cereals to convenience foods such as cereal bars, cookies, toaster pastries, crackers, frozen waffles, snacks and veggie foods. Obesity and Health & Wellness is the primary concern for people in the world today. Kellogg’s has invested on this trend by introducing many health focused products like Kellogg’s ®, Pop-Tarts ®, Cheez-It ®, Mini-Wheats ®, Nutri-Grain Continue reading