Strategic Management Basics

Radical Innovation vs Incremental Innovation

Innovation undoubtedly became the “engine” of the progress, competitive ability and economic growth. Innovation regards as a “life-and-death matter for a firm”. However, paradox is that still some difficulties remain in understanding what exactly the innovation is and how important it is in nowadays world.

Despite the fact that there are many definitions of processes of innovation, generally all innovations contain three underlying elements: newness, improvement and the overcoming of uncertainty. Newness is probably one of the most important parts of innovation, although such newness could be understood as something novel to the form or industry as a whole. Improvement is related to the fact that firms need to find the superior quality to those products which currently exist in the market.… Read the rest

Abey Francis

Relationship Between Organizational Culture and Strategic Management

When any group of people live and work together for any length of time, they form and share beliefs about what is right and proper. They establish behavior patterns based on their beliefs, and their actions often become matters of habit which they follow routinely. These beliefs and ways of behaving create the culture of the organisation. Culture is a pattern of shared tacit assumptions that was learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid in organisation and it is necessary to be taught to new members as the correct way to think, perceive, and feel in relation to those problems that occur in many organisation today.… Read the rest

Abey Francis

Strategic Intent – Definition and Meaning

Strategic Intent refers to a “high level statement of the means by which an organisation achieves its VISION”. Today Managers in different organisations are working hard to match the competitive advantage of their global rivals but in order to do the same most of them end up only imitating what their competitors have already implemented. Imitation doesn’t really create the Strategic Intent as competitors have already mastered those techniques and have exploited the first mover advantage. Hence mere imitation doesn’t lead to competitive revitalization. Strategic Intent drives organisations, individuals and groups to meet the challenge of change in business today.

Strategic Intent as a concept was born in Post-World war II Japan when it dramatically emerged as world leader in economy.… Read the rest

Abey Francis

Linkage Between Business Models and Innovation

The question of what a business model is often remains relatively vague. The main reason for this is because business people have an intuitive understanding of business models. This is normal, since the business model is about how an organization makes money, which is a manager’s job after all. However, there is often a lack of a more precise and shared understanding of what a business model is. Yet, such a common understanding is required if we want to have high quality discussions of one’s business model and make important business model decisions.

Alexander Osterwalder has come up with the 9 building blocks approach to describe business models.… Read the rest

Abey Francis

Analysis of Resource Based View of Strategy

The relationship between firm’s resources and performance are always the crucial area of interest in strategic management. Resource based view (RBV) highlights the internal environment of the firm in crafting strategy to accomplish a sustainable competitive advantage in it.  Resource in RBV can be defined in an extremely broad way. Concepts like dynamic capabilities, entrepreneurship and management are usually regarded as strategic resources. Similarly, RBV also has been defined as stocks of available factors that are owned and controlled by the firm, these factors can be classified into physical, reputational, organizational, financial, human intellectual and technological, which are transformed into final products or services efficiently and effectively.… Read the rest

Abey Francis

Downsizing – A Corporate Restructuring Strategy

Downsizing or layoff is a widespread strategic decision and change practice since 1970’s and during the economic downturn in the year 2016 it became a more common phenomenon. Changing patterns in reasons cited for job loss support this impression of the rising importance of restructurings. Differences in factors such as the state of the economy and the signal sent by job loss could make the process of downsizing and the effects of job loss differ between restructurings of healthy organizations and downsizing due to financial distress.

Downsizing Approaches

There are many kind of approaches in downsizing. The reasons for the firm to undertake such approaches also varies.… Read the rest

Abey Francis