July 6800 Condensed Course Class 1

Summary of the Readings

In The CEO of Canada Goose on Creating a Homegrown Luxury Brand, Reiss (2019) shares some insight from the CEO of Canada Goose regarding creating a homegrown luxury brand. Canada Goose’s CEO believes that attainment of mass distribution by competing on price alone is not necessarily a way to succeed in business but rather a way to just build on commodity pricing. Creating a sustainable global business requires growing from a foundation of core values that prioritize quality above quantity. The CEO points out that being a “Made in Canada” brand was an effective way to compete, especially as other companies were fleeing the country.

In How to Survive a Recession and Thrive Afterward by Walter Frick (2019), the Great Recession was studied via research and case studies, which shed light on four major themes: debt, decision-making, labor management, and digital revolution. Amazon.com enhanced its financial position at the start of the year 2000 by selling convertible bonds worth $672 million. One month later, the dot-com bubble exploded. More than half of all digital start-ups failed in the years that followed, including a considerable number of firms that competed with Amazon in the industry of online commerce at the time. If the bubble had burst a few weeks sooner, one of the world’s most successful companies would have been badly harmed by the recession.

Smith (2013) article “Insight into Board Role in Strategy Making” notes that the role of a board is to participate in the strategic assessment stage, the strategic options stage, and the strategic plan stage. A Portfolio of initiatives is also expected including immediate, short term, and long-term plans. A focus on the current fiscal year, on the next, and 2-3 years in the future earns the right to grow and defend a core business, build on growth initiatives, and create viable options.

KPMG (2010) discusses strategic planning looking at the key questions of a strategy as what to sell, the target customers, and how to avoid/beat the competition. In the why question, KPMG (2010) found that managers must understand that businesses are fluid and change is a must. In the how question, it is recommended that managers extend and defend the current business. A good team is essential for both short and long term growth.

Prahalad and Hamel (1990) address the Core competence of the Corporation noting that many companies are finding it difficult to prevail in global competition. The authors recommend the following for corporations: clarify core competencies, articulate a strategic intent that defines your company and its markets, build core competencies, invest in needed technologies, and cultivating a core competency mind-set.

KPMG’s (2012) article Thoughts on What is Strategy provides 2 key takeaways; that strategy defines where to compete and how to win and that it is the placing of scarce resources at critical points to achieve continuous improvisation. The end game is to create competitive advantage. Ultimately, enduring competitive advantage means offering greater value at less cost compared to the competition.

Whitler (2019) advices marketers to focus on content as opposed to channels and advertising in the article What Western Marketers Can Learn from China. New marketing tenets are evolving as consumer tastes change in the ways they connect with firms. Emerging huge consumer markets like China, which have developed creative methods to economically reach and attract consumers at scale, are the originators of these new marketing approaches.

Personal Reflection

What stood out for me in all of the assigned readings is the value, role, and position of strategy in defining success. There is no such thing as business that has solely isolated functions. They are a component of a more complex scenario that also consists of the social, political, economic, and competitive environments. A company’s strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how it intends to accomplish its objectives in light of the existing circumstances. How successful a business will be over the long term will depend on its plan. Because it involves a significant time and financial commitment and is difficult and costly to modify once it is in place, strategy is a choice that management should take very seriously. If a corporation does certain jobs better than its rivals, it may have an advantage over those rivals. For example, Chinese businesses are showcasing how alternative approaches to marketing, pace, and content will influence business success in the future. All of these elements are hidden within the function of strategy, and I found them very interesting in how they intertwine to create a wining plan.

A business strategy, from my personal point of view, is a written plan that shows how a company plans to reach its goals. A business plan is a written document that describes the organization’s long-term goals and a set of rules that will be used to reach those goals. For example, it will explain how to deal with competitors, evaluate customer needs and expectations, and think about the organization’s potential for long-term growth and sustainability. When a company has a plan, it can look at how well it is doing, what its strengths are, and whether or not these strengths can help it grow. This is why it’s so important to have a plan. This is why having a plan is so important. Few businesses get the job done right the first time. Every organization has flaws that can be traced back to many different things. Business strategies try to deal with these problems so that companies don’t fall prey to them and suffer a lot of damage because of it. These possible dangers are looked at, and the team is helped to find answers to the problems that have been brought up.