Marks And Spencer Case Study

In today’s business industry, there are a number of management and external factors that each organisation has to deal with during day-to-day circumstances. These factors include topic areas such as technology, sustainability, leadership and management and the common environmental factors. On a global scale, every organisation will act differently which brings the number of competitive elements to rise. Within my essay I will discuss these issues in relation to Marks and Spencer, a major British multinational retailer. As a leading high street name, they specialise in the selling of clothing, home goods, and luxury food products making it a major competitor to other retailers.

In relation to business management, the Mintzberg approach, known as the 5 P’s: Plan, Ploy, Pattern, Position, Perspective relates to M&S. In recent news, the management of the M&S Hydepark storage and distribution facility stated that 134 employees would be affected as operations at the site were “scaled down” around April 5th. (DHL spokesperson ‘The Times'). Over past months, meetings have taken place with the affected staff to discuss their options that include; taking redundancy or being redeployed in other areas of the businesses. Many feel this is an issue, however due to the managers and structure in place at M&S, they can make this work. Resulting in aid being delivered to help build an organisation with the resources and competences of what people need. The Mintzberg role suggests every manager’s job combines these roles. M&S managers should recognise they should use many of the roles as they influence others to act upon the future challenges. For the current employees to be successful they need to know what to do, understand their customers, deal...

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...success overnight. The structure of the current business environment is influenced by the characteristics of the market, which determine the behaviour of firms within the market. This behaviour includes the extent to which firms compete on price, innovation and how much they focus on dealing with day-to-day market challenges. For environmental factors all firms will be seen as acting ethically. We still have a business culture based around short-term financial success, in terms of quick profits. All businesses in the world face the same problem. They have limited or finite resources, firms simply don’t have enough resources at their disposal to satisfy all their needs. This means management choices must be made, whereby decisions are needed to select how to allocate scarce resources amongst a range of competing uses thrown up by the changing business environment.