Essay about Strategic Management Task 1

The purpose of this paper is assessing my strategy and decisions in the simulation Biz Café. Then, I will give my results and explain how I got there. However, there were many factors involved creating these results. In this simulation, everything was left up to me to decide how to run my new coffee shop. There were big decisions at the beginning you had to make to create the overall theme of your business. Then, I was to hire employees, buy goods, and act on specials decisions or react to good or bad customer reactions. This, I will explain more in the following paragraphs.

During the simulation I had the role of the CEO and as such relied heavily on my own personal understanding of what we have learned thus far, but also did some research to be able to better assess what would best work. Over the 96-weeks I have a COR rate of 0.17 percent change rate. Although I did not effectively manage change, I was able to learn what worked well and what didn’t. Additionally, learning from our failures is crucial for long term success. In no way will anyone be 100 percent effective in all of their endeavors. The key is to learn from it and

This assignment evaluates the performance of team Baldwin around the success in managing the company over five rounds of the simulation. The assessment will be focused on the round analysis areas with key attention on inventory, profit and contribution margin, emergency loans, and stock price. In addition, the assignment reflects on the areas of improvement and how the team could have developed effectiveness in addressing these key areas in round analysis.

While my effort was to ensure that I marry the product attributes and increase points of difference with increasing customer knowledge of the product – the reduction in sales volume and profitability impacted the spends on communication and training of sales force who could have helped bring in the points of differentiation.

I also undertook several other, less significant adjustments to try and improve performance. I routinely invested in training for my employees when customer satisfaction levels were dropping due to service-related issues. Further, I occasionally invested in advertising and ran sales to promote customer loyalty. I also closed my shop on the weekends, when I anticipated that fewer potential customers would be in the area (due to the store’s location in a business district). Lastly, on the rare occasion that I was offered discounts by one of my suppliers, I generally took advantage of that offer.

Initially, our firm’s business position was at a healthy position. In the beginning of the simulation, our overall market share for the automobile industry was 28.2%; the highest in the market. We realized that our primary strength from product contribution came from our economy car Alec with 63.5% market share for economy cars, and from our utility car, awesome with a 48.5% market share for its vehicle class. Thus, it was evident what we needed to do; maintain high market share of our leading cars while conforming our least profitable vehicle class sustainably to coordinate to customer demand.

Since quarter one was the first quarter of this simulation, I was unaware of how difficult it was going to be to make all the different decisions. Firstly, I had to choose a Company name. Because I was selling computers, I thought that the name “Dev-Tech” was a perfect fit being that this simulation was about development and technology. Next, I had to choose a target segment. I knew going into this simulation that it would be better to invest in the more expensive goods as it would benefit me in the end. The segment that didn’t care about price was Mercedes, so that is the segment that I made my first priority.

    Over the course of the simulation, Gemini has achieved a fair degree of success implementing its strategy and achieving some of its mission objectives. For example, the company has consistently been in the top three performers of the industry, has been able to issue dividends to shareholders consistently, and has payed off all debt.

The company’s competitive strategy exclusively involves the specifics of management’s game plan for competing successfully; its specific efforts to please the customers, its offensive and defensive moves to counter the maneuvers of the competition, its responses to shifting market conditions, its initiatives to strengthen its market position and the specific kind of

* Goals-based planning is perhaps the most common as it starts with a focus on the organization's mission (and vision and/or values), goals to work toward the mission, strategies to achieve the goals, and action planning.

They are given meaning in the minds of managers through processes of selective attention and simplification (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978). Otherwise managers could not possibly cope with the myriad of trends and events that must be organized, analyzed for patterns, and acted upon. Managers therefore adopt a customer-focused or competitor-centered perspective to help simplify their environment and decide what information is to be gathered and how it is to be screened and interpreted. Simplification comes at a cost, which is the risk that only a partial and biased picture of reality is created. A competitor-centered perspective leads to a preoccupation with costs and controllable activities that can be compared directly with corresponding activities of close rivals. Customer-focused approaches have the advantage of examining the full range of competitive choices in light of the customers ' needs and perceptions of superiority, but lack an obvious connection to activities and variables that are controlled by management. Clearly a balance of the two characteristic perspectives is needed. In practice most businesses tilt—in some cases very sharply—toward one or the other. A significant complication in the search for a balanced p>erspective is the confusing welter of overlapping meanings of "competitive advantage." Because there is no agreement on what elements to include or how they are related, information gaps cannot be identified. We address this

The five generic competitive strategies are low-cost provider, broad differentiation, focused low-cost, focused differentiation strategy, and best-cost provider strategy. According to the textbook, “a company’s competitive strategy deals exclusively with the specifics of management’s game plan for competing successfully” (Gamble, 93).

During the business simulation course, we organised a team to become an automotive start-up company and introduced four new products, vehicle models, to satisfy the investors who invested us £500M. Each 4 rounds, we had entered board room to report our initial result and upcoming plans.

Nabradi (1999) states that putting the various strategic choices or the specific strategy to action can be defined as strategy implementation. This involves various processes such as designing the organization’s structure, allocating resources, evolving the decision making process, and handling human resources.

The strategic management process is sometimes improperly perceived as a unidirectional flow of objectives, strategies and decision parameters from management to the employees. In fact, the process should be highly interactive since it is designed to stimulate input from creative, skilled and knowledgeable people working at every level of the business.