Abstract Science Construction’s business is in planning, developing and building road projects. The major of its clients are municipalities, city governments, and other public sector entities. While the bankruptcy rates for these clients is very low, when economic downturns happen, their ability to pay in a timely fashion also suffers. This leads to businesses such as Science Construction needing to take on additional debt and to find creative methods in order to stay afloat during times of recession. Methods such as selling accounts receivables at discounted rates and taking larger lines of credit through banks and other lending institutions are some of the ways organizations can remain viable when their cash inflows have turned into a trickle. Science Construction is asking the Turkish Courts to postpone their bankruptcy proceedings for a year while they attempt to restructure. Through this, suggestions such as forcing shareholders to pay their debt to the organization, gaining credi
Strategic management is a broad concept which can be generally defined as a process of making strategic decisions. What is strategy depends on your perspective. For some, it involves extensive business plans, for others, it may be a competitive advantage gained as a result of exclusive access to a coveted resource. As our reading suggests, there are five P’s in strategic management, not to be confused with five Ps in marketing. These strategic P’s include business Plans, strategic Ploy, a repeatable Pattern which provides a business some advantage, the company’s Position in the industry, and strategic Perspective (Ketchen & Short, 2012).
Literally, no successful organization can survive without a strategic plan in place. No matter how unlikely and spontaneous its’ story may seem, you can be assured there is a very well thought out business plan behind its success. The well known social network, Facebook, which claims to have evolved organically based on what users wanted, was always based on a plan (Digiday, 2015). A modern business plan does not have to be hundreds of pages long as long as it can cover important business details such as its positioning, revenue model, and go to market strategy.
One of the earliest strategic approaches, in order to gain an advantage, was to use some sort of a ploy. Historical military feats like the Trojan Horse and D-Day are good examples of that. This early strategy is still in use today by mega-retailers like Walmart and Amazon who use their size and buying power to monopolize markets and eliminate smaller businesses who are unable to compete with them on this scale. Other ploy types of strategies exist as a convenience factor for customers in businesses like Uber and Netflix. By providing their users with a seamless experience which does not require any additional effort, they lock them into loyal customers.
Microsoft and Apple are companies which are driven by position advantage. Because their software systems and hardware are so widespread, they have become de facto leaders in their industries. Microsoft specifically has a very significant customer base in the corporate world with about 80% of office computer using the Windows operating system. Because of this unique positioning, they have been able to easily promote and sell other products to customers who are already heavily invested in their software ecosystem. Emerging technologies offered by Microsoft like cloud services have seen better growth than their competition from Amazon and Google as a result of this positioning strategy (Evans, 2018).
Strategic Perspective is a unique tool which has allowed many companies to take advantage of an otherwise sour situation. Often a business, in order to achieve a strategic outcome will devise an intended strategy. This, if successful, will become a realized strategy. However, in some cases, a new emergent strategy will present itself, sometimes overtaking the original business goal (Ketchen & Short, 2012). For example, YouTube started out as a video dating service. After it became obvious that people simply wanted to share videos and dating business was not generating enough revenue, they decided to abandon their original plans and focus on what has not become the largest video sharing network (DeMers, 2018). This a perfect example where a change of perspective or what is sometimes called a pivot can change the business direction into a new company.
Many companies have recently realized the importance of strategic management as a standalone capacity within their organization. No longer a domain exclusive to presidents and executive officers, the Office of Strategic Management can now take a role equally important to Finance and Marketing. By developing this as an organizational unit, companies like Chrysler have been able to focus their efforts on developing a broader strategic perspective of their business. The Balanced Scorecard was a concept which was developed as part of such effort and is considered a very important management tool which provides an organization a way to assess its ability to think strategically (Kaplan & Norton, 2005).
Sources:
DeMers, J. (2018). 5 Big Brands That Had Massively Successful Pivots. Entrepreneur. Retrieved from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/308975
Digiday. (2015). Facebook's First Business Plan. Greater Good Ventures. Retrieved from [blog] https://www.greatergoodventures.com/single-post/2015/01/25/Facebooks-First-Business-Plan
Evans, B. (2018). How #1 Microsoft Is Beating Amazon, Google And Everyone Else In The Cloud: The Strategic Breakdown. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/09/17/how-1-microsoft-is-beating-amazon-google-and-everyone-else-in-the-cloud-the-strategic-breakdown/#7c4f850a95d4
Kaplan, R.S. & Norton, D.P. (2005). The Office of Strategy Management. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2005/10/the-office-of-strategy-management
Ketchen, D. & Short, J. (2012) Strategic Management: Evaluation and Execution. Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0 license. Ch. 1.
Literally, no successful organization can survive without a strategic plan in place. No matter how unlikely and spontaneous its’ story may seem, you can be assured there is a very well thought out business plan behind its success. The well known social network, Facebook, which claims to have evolved organically based on what users wanted, was always based on a plan (Digiday, 2015). A modern business plan does not have to be hundreds of pages long as long as it can cover important business details such as its positioning, revenue model, and go to market strategy.
One of the earliest strategic approaches, in order to gain an advantage, was to use some sort of a ploy. Historical military feats like the Trojan Horse and D-Day are good examples of that. This early strategy is still in use today by mega-retailers like Walmart and Amazon who use their size and buying power to monopolize markets and eliminate smaller businesses who are unable to compete with them on this scale. Other ploy types of strategies exist as a convenience factor for customers in businesses like Uber and Netflix. By providing their users with a seamless experience which does not require any additional effort, they lock them into loyal customers.
Microsoft and Apple are companies which are driven by position advantage. Because their software systems and hardware are so widespread, they have become de facto leaders in their industries. Microsoft specifically has a very significant customer base in the corporate world with about 80% of office computer using the Windows operating system. Because of this unique positioning, they have been able to easily promote and sell other products to customers who are already heavily invested in their software ecosystem. Emerging technologies offered by Microsoft like cloud services have seen better growth than their competition from Amazon and Google as a result of this positioning strategy (Evans, 2018).
Strategic Perspective is a unique tool which has allowed many companies to take advantage of an otherwise sour situation. Often a business, in order to achieve a strategic outcome will devise an intended strategy. This, if successful, will become a realized strategy. However, in some cases, a new emergent strategy will present itself, sometimes overtaking the original business goal (Ketchen & Short, 2012). For example, YouTube started out as a video dating service. After it became obvious that people simply wanted to share videos and dating business was not generating enough revenue, they decided to abandon their original plans and focus on what has not become the largest video sharing network (DeMers, 2018). This a perfect example where a change of perspective or what is sometimes called a pivot can change the business direction into a new company.
Many companies have recently realized the importance of strategic management as a standalone capacity within their organization. No longer a domain exclusive to presidents and executive officers, the Office of Strategic Management can now take a role equally important to Finance and Marketing. By developing this as an organizational unit, companies like Chrysler have been able to focus their efforts on developing a broader strategic perspective of their business. The Balanced Scorecard was a concept which was developed as part of such effort and is considered a very important management tool which provides an organization a way to assess its ability to think strategically (Kaplan & Norton, 2005).
Sources:
DeMers, J. (2018). 5 Big Brands That Had Massively Successful Pivots. Entrepreneur. Retrieved from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/308975
Digiday. (2015). Facebook's First Business Plan. Greater Good Ventures. Retrieved from [blog] https://www.greatergoodventures.com/single-post/2015/01/25/Facebooks-First-Business-Plan
Evans, B. (2018). How #1 Microsoft Is Beating Amazon, Google And Everyone Else In The Cloud: The Strategic Breakdown. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/09/17/how-1-microsoft-is-beating-amazon-google-and-everyone-else-in-the-cloud-the-strategic-breakdown/#7c4f850a95d4
Kaplan, R.S. & Norton, D.P. (2005). The Office of Strategy Management. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2005/10/the-office-of-strategy-management
Ketchen, D. & Short, J. (2012) Strategic Management: Evaluation and Execution. Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0 license. Ch. 1.
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