Discussion The unit textbook concepts for our discussion this week are: Corporat

Question

Discussion

The unit textbook concepts for our discussion this week are:

Corporate level strategy

Business level strategy

Five Forces Model

Entrepreneur

Learning Organization

Select one of these concepts and find a related article at the American Management Association news page:http://www.amanet.org/news/inthenews.aspx (Links to an external site.),Entrepreneur Magazine Strategy page: http://www.entrepreneur.com/topic/business-strategy (Links to an external site.) or the Wall Street Journal: http://www.WSJ.com (Links to an external site.) (you can use the Wall Street Journal every week for your discussions in this course - try an inexpensive student subscription).

Search by entering your topic in the search box and you will find one (or several articles) to analyze. Remember to focus upon your selected concept in your analysis

Post your answer in the following format:

CONCEPT:
ARTICLE SUMMARY:
ARTICLE ANALYSIS:
OPINION:

Subject: Mgt & Organizational Behavior(371)

***NOTE*** Please respond on a college leve of 371 and not just quick and general.....give as much information as possible, no matter how lenghty it may be! And please site from where you got your information.

Thanks for all your help.

Explanation / Answer

CONCEPT:Corporate level strategy

ARTICLE SUMMARY:- Corporate level strategy is concerned with the strategic decisions a business makes that affect the entire organization. Financial performance, mergers and acquisitions, human resource management and the allocation of resources are considered part of corporate level strategy.

ARTICLE ANALYSIS:- There are three types of corporate level strategy that a business can employ.

Value-Creating Strategy

A value-creating strategy is one in which the business seeks to edge out its competitors by gaining more market share. These strategies seek to add real and perceived value to the business' products and services by exploiting economies of scope -- the resources and capabilities of the business that can be shared across the entire organization to reduce costs and increase efficiency. A key idea behind value-creating strategy is diversification: offering more products to more consumers within the market in an attempt to dominate all of part of the overall market share.

Value-Neutral Strategy

A business can employ a value-neutral strategy when the organization isn't so much concerned with allocating resources and manpower as it is with securing its current place within the market. In essence, value-neutral strategy helps shore up the business' operations plan. Initiating regulatory oversight, creating synergy between departments, working to reduce risk and securing a steady cash flow are value-neutral approaches.

Value-Reducing Strategy

Businesses also sometimes engage in value-reducing strategies. This happens on an organization-wide level when the stakeholders or customers perceive that the business is getting too big for its britches or that only the top-level executives are benefiting from diversification. In this case, value-reducing strategy refocuses the business' market, helps it define a target demographic and puts mechanisms in place to prevent unnecessary or harmful growth.

Deciding on a Strategy

While it sometimes is evident which type of corporate level strategy an organization should adopt, it is less clear at other times, particularly when the market is unsteady or the business cannot afford to waste resources trying new products and services that may not be profitable. Asking yourself a few strategy-level questions can help in the decision: Does my company feel threatened by competitors? If so, value-creating strategy is the right direction. Does my business need to tighten its resources and monitor its finances more closely? Focus on value-neutral strategy. Are just a select few people benefiting from the organization's success? Consider value-reducing strategy.

OPINION:- In the first case, the organisation may be multidivisional in nature to the extent that in principle or even in law, separate parts of the enterprise could operate as viable entities in their own right.

These ‘group structures’ may undertake strategic planning as group exercise where under the corporate level strategy, each separate subsidiary or division has its own strategic planning process and strategic plan. In these cases however, one of the most significant inputs to each divisions’ strategic planning is the output of the corporate strategic planning. These outputs from corporate level strategy are usually in the form of performance targets for the divisions. The subsidiary units cannot ignore them.

The corporate business strategy may also set down a small number of other factors that the divisions, or strategic business units as they may sometimes be called. These might include guidance on market definition, including geographic scope. For example the subsidiaries of a multinational bank may be defined by the country in which they operate. In this case the corporate business strategy would set profit targets for each country bank. The corporate strategy would yield to the country banks as to the strategies they pursue in generating these profits. The country level banks would have their own business unit level strategies.

In the second case corporate level strategy is used to distinguish it from the many other plans and planning processes that get the term ‘strategic’ in their names. The word strategy has acquired a kind of aura that seems to make many people want to use it, regardless of how actually strategic the matter at hand is in relation to the overall performance of an organisation. Therefore, we can end up with strategic plans for every level, part and functional process in the organization.Strategic planning is a systematic, formally documented process for deciding the handful of key decisions that an organisation, viewed as a corporate whole, must get right in order to thrive over the next few years.However, because of this wide spread usage in a variety of contexts we also use the description ‘corporate level strategy’ or ‘corporate strategy’, and refer sometimes to ‘corporate strategic planning’ to make it clear we are not talking about all these other partial or ‘non-corporate’ forms.Because the successful implementation of corporate level strategy relies on cooperation and alignment across the organization as a whole, it is useful to distinguish the various levels of strategy.

Corporate level strategic questions

So crucial questions addressed by corporate-level strategy, among other possibilities may include:

As these questions show, corporate strategies address the long-term direction for the organization as a whole. Corporate strategies deal with plans for the entire organization and change as the capabilities of the organization develop and as the environment of the organization changes.

Top management has primary decision making responsibility in developing corporate strategies and these managers are directly responsible to providers of capital to the organization, whether shareholders, donors, members, and so on depending on the type of organization . The role of the governing board of is to ensure that top managers actually act to address these owner or primary beneficiary interests.

Conclusion -
Corporate Level Strategy Guides the Organization as a Whole

Strategies for an organization may be classified by the level of the organization responsible for the strategy. Corporate-level strategies concern top management and address strategic issues of facing the organization as a corporate whole.

Business-level strategies deal with major business units or divisions of the corporate portfolio. Business-level strategies are generally developed by upper and middle-level business unit managers, in negotiation on key targets with the top corporate managers, and are intended to help the organization achieve its corporate level strategy.

Functional or business process strategies address issues usually faced by lower-level managers and deal with strategies for the major organizational functions such as marketing, finance, production, and research, which are considered important to achieving the business strategies and enabling the corporate-level strategy.

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