Strategy involves standing out from the competition and making choices that give the company a unique and valuable position by offering distinctive products and services. Competitive advantage and profitability can be achieved simultaneously by approaches that create consistent internal synergies and combine a company’s operational activities efficiently. Strategies are formed at various levels of the organization. However, a typical organizational structure incorporates strategies at 3 specific levels: corporate, business and functional. Corporate strategy defines a company’s holistic growth and management direction pertaining to its various businesses, products and services. Business strategies, on the other hand, are established at the divisional levels and typically focus on enhancing the strategic business unit’s competitive position in its industry. Functional strategies aim to maximize resource productivity and are typically set by functional departments within each SBU to improve competencies and performance. Blue Ocean strategies are a form of business level strategies that enable firms Continue reading
Modern Management Practices
Total Quality Management (TQM) Implementation
Total Quality Management (TQM) is a method by which management and employees can become involved in the continuous improvement of the production of goods and services. It is a combination of quality and management tools aimed at increasing business and reducing losses due to wasteful practices. Total Quality Management (TQM) views an organization as a collection of processes. It maintains that organizations must strive to continuously improve these processes by incorporating the knowledge and experiences of workers. The simple objective of TQM is “Do the right things, right the first time, every time.” TQM is infinitely variable and adaptable. Although originally applied to manufacturing operations, and for a number of years only used in that area, TQM is now becoming recognized as a generic management tool, just as applicable in service and public sector organizations. A preliminary step in Total Quality Management (TQM) implementation is to assess the organization’s Continue reading
Minimizing Resistance to Organizational Change
Resistance to change be those affected is often the single most formidable obstacle to its successful realization. It is to be understood at the outset that resistance to change is not, the fundamental problem to be solved. Rather, any resistance is usually a symptom of more basic problems underlying the particular situation. To focus the attention of symptom alone will achieve at best only limited results. The effective solution is that one must look beyond the symptom that is resistance to its more basic causes. It is quite appropriate and practicable for a manager to focus on situational and environmental factors that cause resistance. Many of these are directly within management’s control. Probably, efforts to minimize any resistance should be undertaken while it is still potential rather than real. There are different methods that the managers can use to minimizing resistance to organizational change. Fundamentally, there are only two strategic Continue reading
Case Study of Sony: Successful Implementation of Stakeholder Management
Through an established set of public relation protocols, Sony uses a broad set of communication activities that are employed to create and maintain favorable relationship with the various stakeholders that include employees, shareholders, suppliers, media, educators, potential investors, financial institutions, government agencies and officials as well as society in general. Stakeholders who need any information concerning Sony, they could retrieve them readily from the company’s website. In this way Sony creates a common platform (touch-point) where mutual relationship with its stakeholders is facilitated, including serving the wishes and demands of its customers. Sony satisfies its customers by offering innovative products without having to compromise to quality and reliability. This helps to attract new customers as well as retain existing ones. In order to ensure that all specific needs are met, Sony set up sales and marketing offices in every place that the company has businesses in. Sony’s CEO, Nobuyuki Idei, Continue reading
Six Sigma – A Business Process Improvement Methodology
Six Sigma is a methodology that provides businesses with the tools to improve the capability of their business processes. This increase in performance and decrease in process variation leads to defect reduction and vast improvement in profits, employee morale and quality of product “It’s the only program I’ve ever seen where customers win, employees are engaged and satisfied, and shareholders are rewarded.” – Jack Welch Historical Background of Six Sigma Around 1980 Robert Galvin, at that time CEO at Motorola, realized the importance of working systematically with variance reduction as the Japanese had done for a prolonged period. Together with Bill Smith, Mikel Harry and Richard Schroeder, he created an improvement program that was given the name Six Sigma. Bill Smith came up with the idea of “inserting hard-nosed statistics into the blurred philosophy of quality”. The program was inspired by Japanese work, but also strongly influenced by Juran’s thoughts. Continue reading
Organization Development Interventions
Organization Development Interventions refer to various activities which consultant and client organization perform for improving organizational functioning by enabling organization members to better manage their team and organization cultures. French and Well have defined Organization Development interventions as “sets of structured activities in which selected organizational units (target groups or individuals) engage with a task or a sequence of tasks where the task goals are related directly or indirectly to organizational improvement. Interventions constitute the action thrust of organization development; they make things happen and are what is happening.” Organizational Development Intervention Techniques Sensitivity Training: Sensitivity training is a small-group interaction under stress in an unstructured encounter group, which requires people to become sensitive to one another’s feelings in order to develop reasonable group activity. In sensitivity training, the actual technique employed is T-group. T-group has several characteristic features: The T-group is generally small, from ten to twenty members The Continue reading