“An internal capacity for leveraging resources and competences is a prerequisite for creating competitive advantage. Discuss, with references to theory and real world organization of your choice”. Strategic management is a multi faced and vast area of study with many theorists presenting differing views as to what is crucial to the successful formulation of strategy. This essay will present an explanation of the internal capacity of leveraging resources and competences and show how they are creating competitive advantage. This will be illustrated through the identification of the key drivers of competitive advantage. A strategic capability analysis of an organisation, namely Marks and Spencer. will be undertaken in order to identify …show more content…
Furthermore, according to Michael E. Porter: ‘Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities. The essence of strategic positioning is to choose activities that are different from rivals’. (M. E. Porter, Harvard Review) However, creating sustaining competitive advantage in business is not just uniqueness or being different. While well-built core competencies and competitive capabilities are key support in performing strategy, they are just as significant for securing a competitive edge over competitors in position where it is quite easy for rivals to copy smart strategies. Thomson et al (2004) states that: ‘Any time rivals can readily duplicate successful strategy features, making it difficult or impossible to out strategize rivals and beat them in the marketplace with a superior strategy, the chief way to achieve lasting competitive advantage is to out execute them.’ (Thomson et al, 2004:254) Moreover, it is very hard to create a strategy which nobody could copy and that the strategy would last long term. Usually, the core competence or capability emerges incrementally. As Johnson et al (2005) illustrates in The Risk of Strategic Drift. This is understood as step by step changes. What was working in the past, will be working in the future. There are no significant changes in the existing strategy. Johnson et al uses the study of strategic lenses and suggest that: ‘Experience lens views strategy development
The paper that I 'm writing will help you to gain information on how Strategic Management and Strategic Competitiveness play hand and hand when dealing with a business. The business that I have chosen to write about is Nike. I have always wanted to know the practices that Nike used to make their business last this long and how have they been so successful. I will explain to you how globalization and technology changes have helped or hurt the company and the major role that it has played. I also plan to construct a plan to see how my corporation could earn above-average returns and increase their gaining potential. I will explain Nike 's vision and mission statement and show how this had allowed them to continue to be one of the most outstanding business in this day and age. In turn, I plan to show how each or stakeholder plays an important role in the success of the corporation.
Selecting a business strategy that details valuable resources and distinctive competencies, strategizing all resources and capabilities and ensuring they are all employed and exploited, and building and regenerating valuable resources and distinctive competencies is key. The analysis of resources, capabilities and core competencies describes the external environment which is subject to change quickly. Based off this information a firm has to be prepared and know its internal resources and capabilities and offer a more secure strategy. Furthermore, resources and capabilities are the primary source of profitability. Resources entail intangible, tangible, and human resources.
Competitive advantage – competitive advantage is the ability of one organization to outperform other organizations because it produces desired goods or services more efficiently and effectively than its competitors. The four building blocks of competitive advantage are superior efficiency, speed, flexibility, innovation, and responsiveness to customers.
A method by which the strategy development can be explained is the “strategic lenses”. This method views strategy development as design, experience, ideas and discourse. Strategy as design means that it emerged through rational processes, whereas the experience lens sees the strategy as the outcome of individual and collective experiences. The lens “discourse” sees strategy as the result of communication and concepts. The last lens, which is the idea lens, is about the development of strategy as a result of innovation (Johnson et al, 2008).
For a business to be successful and have a competitive advantage, it is important to evaluate the company’s resources and capabilities (Pitt & Koufopoulos, 2012). Resources in a company are the productive assets owned (tangible or intangible) whereas capabilities are what the company can do with this (Grant, 2010). “Establishing competitive
Through an internal environment analysis, companies can identify and understand their own unique resources, capabilities, and competencies that are required for their sustainable competitive advantage. Resources, capabilities, and core competencies are the foundation of competitive advantage. There is no competitive advantages are permanently sustainable in any companies, so they have to consist on their current advantages and develop new advantages by internally understanding and analyzing their resources and capabilities. Competitors have their own unique resources, capabilities, and core competencies to create values for their customers. Both tangible and intangible resources, which include individual, social and organizational phenomena, are combined to generate capabilities. In turn, company’s capabilities are used to build core competencies. Also, core competencies are as a source of competitive advantage for a company to win in the competitive market.
This strategy emphasizes the use of an organization’s resources and capabilities to achieve a core competence that cannot be imitated by competitors. Furthermore, the resource based school argues that if an organization distinctively improves its internal capability; that is being able to have effective inside machinery to deliver products and services to customers, the organization will enjoy a massive advantage in the market. This school also argues that in order to have a competitive advantage, an organization must have resource and capabilities that are sophisticated to those of competitors (QuickMBA,
The resource audit, value chain analysis and core competence analysis help to define the strategic capabilities of a
Strategic decisions are often based on by the company can use its existing competitive advantages in the process of promoting the value and capital growth (Lynch, 2009). However, sustained competitive advantage on how to perform these operations largely depends on the company. (Porter, 2008) The need for business development and expansion has been known to promote the product and marketing innovation, which in turn prompted them to take the basis of the different organisational strategic, it’s based on products and target markets (Ansoff, 1984).
Alfred Chandler(1963) defines strategy as ‘ the determination of the long-run goals and objectives of an enterprise and the adoption of courses of action of an enterprise and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals’. And Michael porter(1996) sees it as ‘Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value’.
“Competitive strategy involves positioning a business to maximize the value of the capabilities that distinguish it from its competitor’s” (Porter 1980:47). A successful business plan requires first and foremost the formation of an appropriate strategy. Through the implementation of a suitable strategy, the company is able to obtain its own industry niche and gain an understanding of its customers (Porter 1985). Whichever strategy is adopted it must be adequately integrated within the firms goals and missions to achieve a competitive advantage (Parker and Helms 1992).
Changing circumstances and ongoing management efforts to improve the strategy cause a company 's strategy to evolve over time—a condition that makes the task of crafting a strategy a work in progress,
There are countless sources of competitive advantage available to help companies of all types and sizes grow their business and improve their profitability, provided that business leaders know where to look. Aristotle Onassis believed that the secret to business success was simply "knowing something that nobody else knows," while organizational behavior theorists believe that the secret to success requires acquiring and sustaining a
According to them, the profit-maximizing and competition-based theory focuses on the notion that the central objective of business organization is to exploit long term profit and develop sustainable competitive advantage over rivals in the external business environment. Correspondingly, the industrial-organization posits that the state or position of an organization within the external business environment is very essential for attaining and sustaining competitive advantage, which relates to the theoretical stance of the traditional industrial-organizational theorist who perceived strategic management as a systematic model for assessing competition within an industry (Porter, 1981). On the other hand, the resource-based theory which materializes from the belief that the basis of organizations competitive advantage is inherent in the internal resources, as opposed to their positioning in the external environment. That is rather than simply evaluating environmental opportunities and threats in conducting business, competitive advantage depends on the unique resources and capabilities that a firm possesses (Barney,