On 4th July 2007, Fiat Auto the Flagship division of Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (FIAT) re-launched its heritage brand the Fiat 500. It was exactly 50yrs after the launch of Fiat 500 on 4th July 1957, which not only helped Fiat in post World War-II recovery but also provided mass motorization to Italians. Luca De Meo, CEO, Fiat Auto, on the re-launch occasion stated that “This is the car that gave ordinary Italians four wheels for the first time; that transformed a country and a company.” In its 18yrs of career between 1957 and 1975, 3,893,294 Fiat 500s were built & sold, which provided millions of Italians and Europeans individual mobility. Post 1970 with beginning of free trade in Europe, Fiat’s market share eroded continuously. Foreign companies such as Volkswagen, Renault, Ford, Peugeot, Honda and Toyota became prominent players in the Italian car market threatening survival of Fiat. The prime Continue reading
Business Strategies
Strategic Business Plan
Either in the start up process or when re-inventing one’s business development, the design of a strategic business plan is an indispensable step towards a successful and viable business. Strategic planning involves setting up a sound and multifaceted plan or strategy to follow over a defined time period. It can involve all aspects of the business, or just a small part of it i.e. a selected department such as the marketing department. However, this does not mean that strategic business planning is only for large scale businesses since it can also benefit the small business, especially at start up, when the business sets its first goals and establishes itself in the business landscape. Writing up a business plan is an important step of a starting business, since most lending bodies will not authorize loans in absence of a detailed business plan. Why is it important? Imagine sailing off for a Continue reading
Reasons for the Increased Diversification by Business Firms
Growth through mergers and diversification represents a very good alternative to be taken into account in business planning. The external growth contributes to opportunities for effective alignment to the firm’s changing environments. The primary reason for acquiring or merging with another business is to produce improved cash flow or to reduce the risk faster or at a lower cost than achieving the same goal internally. Thus, the goal of any acquisition is to create a strategic advantage by paying a price for the target that is lower than the total resources required for internal development of a similar strategic position. Another reason is the expectation on the part of the diversifying or acquiring firm that it has or will have excess capacity of general managerial capabilities in relation to its existing product market activities. Moreover, there is an expectation that in the process of interacting with the generic management activities, Continue reading
Business Level Strategies – Cases of Wal-Mart, Apple, Zara and Ikea
Business Level Strategy is concerned more with how a business competes successfully in a particular market. It relates to strategic decisions about the choice of products, identifying and fulfilling the needs of customers, building competitive advantages over competitors, exploiting or creating new opportunities etc. Business level strategies are essentially positioning strategies whereby businesses tend to secure for themselves an identity and position in the market. The aim here is to increase the business value for the corporate and stakeholders by increasing the brand awareness and value perceived by the customers. They can either focus on pricing or product differentiation to increase the perceived customer value. Customers are the foundation of successful business-level strategy – Who will be served by the strategy? What needs shall the strategy satisfy? How will the strategy satisfy those needs? The low cost strategy emphasizes having the lowest costs, not necessarily the lowest price, in a Continue reading
Risk Management Within an Organization
Risk management is a identification process of upcoming threats and danger to an organization. In an organization risk can enter through many ways, it can come from project failure, financial market, an accident in organisation such as flood, earthquake, cyclone, power failure, public health and safety and legal risk etc. Risk can be low to medium, or medium to high. It is difficult to say that an organisation can solve all the upcoming risks to the organisation like earthquake, we can just assume that earthquake can damage the business, but we cannot say how much, but there are some alternatives of upcoming threats like in power failure we can use generator to keep running the business. The purpose of risk management within an organization to identify problems before they enter and create problems in the organisation, so that risk management handling process may be planed. It is a continuous looking Continue reading
Case Study: IBM’s Turnaround Under Lou Gerstner
“Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance” describes how Louis Gerstner lead the organizational turnaround at IBM when it was at the verge of extinction. Louis Gerstner was the chairman and CEO of IBM from April 1993 to March 2002. Before joining IBM, he had worked on various consulting assignments at McKinsey and led successful organizational changes at American Express and RJR Nabisco. During the early nineties, IBM was rapidly losing its market share in most of the markets it catered to its competitors. The management was planning to break the organization into individual businesses. Soon after his appointment as CEO, Gerstner identified that the unique competitive advantage of IBM was due to its scale and broad-based capabilities, and therefore advocated that “keeping the company together” will help IBM to utilize this unique advantage by positioning itself as software integrator. Gerstner was instrumental in shifting the mental model of employees from self-centric Continue reading