Growing an existing business often involves expansion of capacity, in terms of plant, human resources, technological infrastructure, R&D facilities, etc. Any major capacity expansion is a strategic decision that involves significant resource commitments and is often difficult to reverse. So such a decision has to be made carefully. Capacity expansion strategy is often narrowly applied to manufacturing. But in many businesses, there is no or little manufacturing. So, capacity needs to be understood in terms of the investments made in the most critical area of the value chain. Thus, in the pharmaceutical industry, capacity has to be defined in terms of scientific manpower and sales force. In a software development company, capacity has to be understood in terms of the number of programmers employed. In a Business School, capacity may be defined as the number of professors available to teach students. According to Michael Porter, the decision to expand capacity Continue reading
Business Strategies
SWOT Analysis – A Strategic Planning Tool
SWOT is an acronym for internal Strength (S) and Weakness (W) of an organization, and external Opportunities (O) and Threats (T) facing that organization. A merging of the organization’s resources with the opportunities in the environment results in an assessment of the organization’s opportunities. This merging is frequently called SWOT analysis because it brings together the organization’s Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats in order to identify a strategic niche that the organization can exploit. SWOT analysis provides information that is helpful in matching the firms’ resources and capabilities to the competitive environment in which it operates and is therefore an important contribution to the strategic planning process. Having completed the SWOT analysis, the organization reassesses its mission and objectives. In the light of the SWOT analysis and identification of the organization’s opportunities, management reevaluates its mission and objectives. Are they realistic? Do they need modification? If changes are Continue reading
Porter’s Generic Competitive Strategies
In 1985, in his book Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, Michael Porter, outlined a set of generic strategies that could be applied to all products or services. In coping with the Porters model of five competitive forces, there are three potentially successful generic strategic approaches (also known as Porter’s Generic Competitive Strategies) to outperforming other firms in an industry: Overall cost leadership. Differentiation. Focus. Sometimes the firm can successfully pursue more than one approach as its primary target, though this is rarely possible as will be discussed further. Effectively implementing any of these generic strategies usually requires total commitment and supporting organizational arrangements that are diluted if there is more than one primary target. The generic strategies are approaches to outperforming competitors in the industry; in some industries structure will mean that all firms can earn high returns, whereas in others, success with one of the generic Continue reading
Case Study: The Meteoric Rise and Fall of Uber’s Founder Travis Kalanick
Travis Kalanick is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder of Uber Technologies Inc., a ride-hailing company that revolutionized the transportation industry. He was born on August 6, 1976, in Los Angeles, California. Kalanick grew up in a middle-class family and showed an early interest in entrepreneurship. Kalanick attended the University of California, Los Angeles, but dropped out before completing his degree to pursue his entrepreneurial ventures. He co-founded his first startup, Scour, a peer-to-peer file-sharing company, in 1998. However, Scour faced significant legal challenges related to copyright infringement and was eventually forced to file for bankruptcy. Kalanick went on to found several other startups, including Red Swoosh, a content delivery network, and Uber, which he co-founded in 2009 with Garrett Camp. Under Kalanick’s leadership, Uber grew rapidly, expanding into hundreds of cities around the world and attracting billions of dollars in investment. However, Kalanick’s tenure at Uber was also marked Continue reading
Case Study of Starbucks: An Amazing Business Success Story
American coffee consumption had been on the decline for more than a decade when Seattle entrepreneurs Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker, and Zev Siegl opened the first Starbucks in Seattle’s Pike Place Market in 1971. By the 1970s, the country’s major coffee brands were engaged in a bitter price war that forced them to use cheaper beans in their blends to reduce costs, resulting in a dramatic decline in the quality of America’s most popular coffees. Accompanying this decline in quality was a decline in coffee consumption, which had peaked at 3.1 cups per day in 1961. As Americans gradually became disenchanted with the store brands, java enthusiasts–concentrated primarily on the West Coast–began experimenting with the finer coffees of Europe that offered richer, fuller flavors. To harness the potential of the gourmet coffee trend in the Seattle area, the founders of Starbucks experimented with the new concept of a store dedicated Continue reading
Internal-External (IE) Matrix
The Internal-External (IE) Matrix positions an organization’s various divisions in a nine cell matrix. The IE Matrix is a strategic management tool which is used to analyze the current position of the divisions and suggest the strategies for the future. The Internal-External (IE) Matrix is based on an analysis of internal and external business factors which are combined into one suggestive model. The IE matrix is a continuation of the EFE matrix and IFE matrix models. The Internal-External (IE) Matrix is based on two key dimensions: the IFE total weighted scores on the x €‘axis and the EFE total weighted scores on the y axis. Recall that each division of an organization should construct an IFE Matrix and an EFE Matrix for its part of the organization. The total weighted scores derived from the divisions allow construction of the corporate-level IE Matrix. On the x €‘axis of the IE Matrix, an Continue reading