What is Strategy?
I. Operational Effectiveness Is Not Strategy
Most of the management tools that are used today are benchmarking, total quality management, partnering, outsourcing and reengineering. Companies use these tools to enhance the operational effectiveness, but fail to provide company with sustainable profitability. This is the reason failure of differentiate between strategy and operational effectiveness. Operational effectiveness and strategy are both necessary for the greater performance of an organization, but they work in different ways. Operational effectiveness performs similar activities better than the rivals perform them. It refers to many practices that allow a company to better utilize its inputs. In contrast strategy means performing different activities from rivals or performing similar activities in different ways. Porter said that a company can outperform rivals only if it can establish a difference it can preserve. The productivity frontier is the sum of all existing best practices at any given time. The competition based operational effectiveness moves the frontier outward and effectively raises the bar for everyone but such competition produces absolute improvement in operational effectiveness and no relative improvement for anyone.
II. Strategy Rests on Unique Activities
Competitive strategy means being different. According to Porter heart of strategy is choosing to perform activities different than rivals. Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities. Strategic positions arise from three sources, which are not equally exclusive and often overlap. The first Variety-based positioning based on choices of products or services variations rather th...
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...overall strategy. Consistency makes it easier to communicate the strategy to customers, employees, and shareholders. Second-order fit arises when activities are reinforcing. Third-order fit goes beyond activity reinforcement. The fit among activities reduces cost or increases differentiation. If there is no fit among the activities, there is also no distinctive strategy and tiny sustainability.
V. Rediscovering Strategy
External changes can pose a threat to a company’s strategy a greater threat to strategy arises from within the company. One way to approach to persevering growth and reinforcing strategy is to focus on contingent a strategic position rather than broadening and compromising it. A company should choose its new position depending on its ability to find new trade-offs and influence a new system of balancing activities into a maintainable advantage.
According to Parnell, Porter’s generic strategy typology consist of a “basic economic assumptions about cost versus differentiation, and the whole notion of focus and market orientation but this strategy has some limitation” (2014). This strategy typology helps to simplify a complex industry by identifying and emphasizing the key strategic factors. These factors are low-cost with focus, low-cost without focus, differentiation without focus and differentiation with focus.
Operations refers to the transformation of raw materials(inputs) into finished products(outputs). The operations process is one of the key business functions and is a crucial component to business success. Like every business, Qantas is affected by many internal and external influences requiring it to have effective strategies to respond to these influences. Businesses that are able to adopt and utilise effective operational strategies are able to quickly adapt and either reduce or take advantage of these influences that impact the business. The effectiveness of these strategies can measured by Qantas’ performance and whether or not it is able to hold it’s competitive advantage. How well these strategies respond to the influences on operations will determine the level of success that Qantas achieves.
Arthur, A., Thompson, Margaret, A., Peteraf, John, E. Gamble, A., J., Strickland III. (2014). Crafting & Executing Strategy: The Quest for Competitive Advantage 19e: Concepts & Cases. C6-C25.
The Bloody Saturday monument, located at the intersection of Main Street and Market Avenue in Winnipeg, Manitoba, serves as a moving reminder of a significant turning point in Canadian labour history. This unique public art piece commemorates the events of June 21st, 1919, known as the Winnipeg General Strike, and more specifically, the conflict that occurred on that day, now referred to as "Bloody Saturday. " The monument, designed by artists Bernie Miller and Noam Gonick, is shaped like a tilting steel streetcar, just like the historical streetcar present at the site of the confrontation. The sculpture effectively conveys the human experience of the labour struggle through its significant location, form, and material. In this essay, I will
Business strategy is the means by which firm’s plans to achieve its goals and objectives. It can also be termed as organization long-term planning. The strategy covers periods between 3-5 years and sometimes longer. Businesses use two major types of strategy, general or generic and competitive strategies. The overall strategy involves strategies of growth, globalization and retrenchment. The competitive advantage includes low pricing, product and customer differentiation. We will look at the business strategy used by Marks and Spenser (Cole, 1997). The company is a British multinational located at Westminster London and specializes in clothes and luxurious food products.
Porter, M. E. (2008). The five competitive forces that shape strategy. Harvard business review, 86(1), 25-40.
Numerous definitions of strategy exist, in most circumstances strategy can loosely be explained as an overall plan of deployment of resources to ascertain a favourable position within a market (Zablah, Bellenger and Johnston 2004; Grant 1994, p 14). Further, imbedded in many successful organisations are strategies, the importance of which is to remain relevant in the market, and successful in the various attributes of business; profiteering, employee motivation, maintaining sustainable core competencies, effectiveness in operation, or efficiency in the conduction of operations. Therefore challenges involved in the formulation and implementation of a strategy can revolve around the overall external market, as well as internal
Thompson, A. A., Strickland, A. J., & Gamble, J. E. (2008). Crafting & executing strategy: The quest for competitive advantage (16th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Irwin.
Porter, M. E. (2008). The five competitive forces that shape strategy. Harvard business review, 25-40.
Porter, M. E., 1999. The Five Forces that Shape Competitive Strategy. Harvard business review, p. 80.
Thompson, A.A., Strickland, A.J., & Gamble, J. E. (2010). Crafting and executing strategy: The quest for competitive advantage: Concepts and cases: 2009 custom edition (17th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill-Irwin
According to Doyle, (1983) positioning strategy refers to the selection of a marked market segment that shows all the customers a type of business that could seek out to serve and the option of choosing the differential advantage that explains the way it is going to compare against all its competitors in the same segment. It could be said from this definition that a positioning strategy applies mainly at a certain product’s level or/and service, working in the limits of a particular market and the fact that it should not really be mistaken with a wider concept of “corporate” strategy, or with any other concepts that are more specifically related to strategy such due to the fact that it could be related to every individual matter in the marketing mix, such as a “pricing” or “promotional” strategy.
A strategy which is adopted by an organisation indicates what area the firm intends to do well in.
There are various schools of strategy that have been vigorously debated on and after a consolidated effort; three schools of strategy were produced. They are the planning school, the positional school, and the resource based school of strategy (Ritson, 2013). All these strategies will be described with examples to buttress each.
...ompletes an analytical assessment of a firm. A firm establishes its competitive building by investing scarce resources again and again in its value-added activities. By doing this the organizations will be able to give rise superior products and services that the buyer's desire and continue to grow the business and adhere to its strategic plan once implemented.