Are approaches used by an organization that acts on its own to influence stakeholders or change some aspect of its current environment quizlet?

Open systems

Organizations that affect and are affected by their environments and other systems.

Inputs

Goods and services that organizations take in and use to create products or services.

Outputs

The products and services organizations create.

Macroenvironment

The general environment; includes governments, economic conditions, and other fundamental factors that generally affect all organizations

five components of an organization's macroenvironment include

laws and regulations

the economy

technology

demographics

social values

Competitive environment

Porters 5 forces

Rivals

New competitors

customers

Substitute services or products

suppliers

Internal Environment

Managers, employees, resources, and organizational culture.

culture
values
resources
capabilities

Organizational culture

The set of important assumptions about the organization and its goals and practices that members of the company share

Corporate culture establishes and maintains the business philosophy, values, beliefs, and related behaviors among employees.

Ex. Apple:
- Top-notch excellence
- Creativity
- Innovation
- Secrecy
- Moderate combativeness

The three levels of organizational culture

- Visible artifacts
- Values
- Unconscious assumptions

Visible artifacts

visible signs of an organization's culture, such as the office design and layout, company dress code, and company benefits and perks, like stock options, personal parking spaces, or the private company dining room

value

Under the surface, desirable qualities and behaviors

Unconscious assumptions

the strongly held and taken-for-granted beliefs that guide behavior in the firm

Ethos

Spirit of the culture, innate feeling

External Environment

customers

competitive partnerships

supplier relationships

The task environment consists of

external factors that directly affect and are affected by the organization's operations.

Regulators include agencies such as:

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

Occupational Safety and Health Administration

Federal Aviation Administration

Food and Drug Administration

National Labor Relations Board

Attractive Environments

Competitors: Few, high industry growth, unequal size differentiated

Threat of entry: low threat, many barriers

Substitutes: few

Suppliers: Many, low bargaining power

Customers: Many, low bargaining power

Unattractive Environments

Competitors: Many, low industry growth, equal size, commodity

Threat of entry: high threat, few entry barriers

Substitutes: many

Suppliers: few, high bargaining power

Customers: few, high bargaining power

Examples of barriers to entry

capital req, start-up cost; branding; customers; lack of economies of scale; distro channels, gov policy, patent expiration.

Environmental uncertainty

When management lacks information to understand or predict the future

Environmental dynamism

The degree of discontinuous change that occurs within an industry.

High-growth industries (e.g., smartphones) with products and technologies that change rapidly are more uncertain than stable industries (e.g., utilities) where change is less dramatic and more predictable.

Discontinuous change

Non-incremental, sudden change that threatens existing or traditional authority or power structure.

Environmental Complexity

the number of issues to which a manager must attend, and the degree to which they are interconnected.

Industries (e.g., the automotive industry) with many different firms that compete in vastly different ways tend to be more complex—and uncertain—than industries (e.g., airplane manufacturers) with only a few key competitors.

Environmental scanning

Searching for and sorting through information about changes in the environment

Managers can ask questions such as these:
- Who are our current competitors?
- Are there few or many entry barriers to our industry?
- What substitutes exist for our product or service? - Is the company too dependent on powerful suppliers?
- Is the company too dependent on powerful customers?

Answers to these questions help managers develop competitive intelligence, the information necessary to decide how best to manage in the competitive environment they have identified.

Porter's competitive analysis, can guide environmental scanning and help managers evaluate the competitive potential of different environments.

We may wish to think of two extreme environments: an attractive environment, which gives a firm a competitive advantage, and an unattractive environment, which puts a firm at a competitive disadvantage.

Competitive intelligence

Information that helps managers determine how to compete better

best-case scenario

the occurrence of events that are favorable to the firm

Benchmarking

Comparing an organization's practices and technologies with those of other companies

Scenarios

As managers try to determine the effect of environmental forces on their organizations, they often develop different outcomes that are uncertain in the future—alternative combinations of different factors that form a total picture of the environment and the firm.

The value of scenarios is that they help managers develop contingency plans for what they might do given different outcomes.

They constantly update the scenarios to take into account relevant new factors that emerge, such as significant changes in the economy or actions by competitors.

Also, managers try to identify strategies that are the most robust across all of the different scenarios.

Whereas environmental scanning identifies important factors, and scenario development develops alternative pictures of the future, forecasting predicts exactly how some variable or variables will change in the future.

worst-case scenario

the occurrence of unfavorable events

forecasts

Method for predicting how variables will change the future

The accuracy of forecasts varies from application to application.

Because they extrapolate from the past to project the future, forecasts tend to be most accurate when the future ends up looking a lot like the past.

Forecasts are most useful when the future will look radically different from the past.

Unfortunately, that is when forecasts tend to be less accurate. The more things change, the less confidence we have in our forecasts.

Accuracy decreases as you go further into the future.

"You have power over your mind - not outside events, realize this, and you will find strength

Marcus Aurelius

Buffering

Creating supplies of excess resources in case of unpredictable needs

Independent strategies

Strategies that an organization acting on its own uses to change (or manage, shape) some aspect of its current environment

In addition to adapting or reacting to the environment, managers and organizations can develop proactive responses aimed at influencing stakeholders or changing the environment.

Two general types of proactive responses are independent action and cooperative action.

A company uses independent strategies when it acts on its own to influence stakeholders or change some aspect of its current environment.

Cooperative Action to influence the external environment

Cooperative strategies

Strategies used by two or more organizations working together to manage the external environment

Contracts, Cooptation, and Coalition

Smoothing

Leveling normal fluctuations.

Example- reduce prices to move jacket inventory at end of winter.

Cooperative strategies

Contracts

negotiating an agreement between the organization and another group to exchange goods, services, information, patents, and so on.

Suppliers and customers, or managers and labor unions, may sign formal agreements about the terms and conditions of their future relationships.

These contracts are explicit attempts to make their future relationships predictable.

Cooperative strategies

Coalition

groups that act jointly with respect to a set of political initiatives for some period

Change the Boundaries of the Environment

Strategic maneuvering

Domain selection

AKA adjacent market

Entrance to a new market or industry with an existing expertise.

Ex. Raytheon using flight control radar expertise to enter the tolling business.

Cooperative strategies

Cooptation

absorbing new elements into the organization's leadership structure to avert threats to its stability or existence.

Many universities invite wealthy alumni to join their boards of directors.

Mergers

One or more companies combine with another

Mergers and acquisitions can offer greater efficiency from combined operations or can give companies relatively quick access to new markets or industries.

Acquisitions

One firm buys another

Mergers and acquisitions can offer greater efficiency from combined operations or can give companies relatively quick access to new markets or industries.

Divestiture

A firm selling one or more businesses

Strategic maneuvering

organizations can redefine or change which environment they are in.

An organization's conscious efforts to change the boundaries of its task environment.

By making a conscious effort to change the boundaries of its competitive environment, a firm can maneuver around potential threats and capitalize on opportunities.

Managers can use several strategic maneuvers, including
- domain selection
- diversification
- merger and acquisition
- divestiture

Prospectors

Continuously change the boundaries of their task environment by seeking new products and markets, diversifying and merging, or acquiring new enterprises

Aggressive companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple continuously change the boundaries of their competitive environments by seeking new products and markets, diversifying, and merging or acquiring new enterprises.

In these and other ways, corporations put their competitors on the defensive and force them to react.

Defenders

Stay within a stable product domain as a strategic maneuver

stay within a more limited, stable product domain.

Diversification

A firm's investment in a different product, business, or geographic area.

occurs when a firm invests in different types of businesses or products or when it expands geographically to reduce its dependence on a single market or technology.

Ex. Starbucks selling mugs in Australia etc.

Weak culture

different people hold different values, there is confusion about corporate goals, and it is not clear from one day to the next what principles should guide decisions.

Fosters confusion, conflict, and poor performance.

Most managers would agree that they want to create a strong culture that encourages and supports goals and useful behaviors that will make the company more effective.

In other words, they want to create a culture that is appropriately aligned with the organization's competitive environment

Alignment missing between speech and action.

True or false: In a slow-growing, mature industry, competition intensifies and profits fall.

TRUE

Stock Market affects on individual managers

- May feel required to meet Wall Streets earnings expectations and is likely you will be asked to improve budget or sales numbers

- Such external pressures usually have a positive effect helping firms become more profitable and efficient

- But failure to meet expectations causes the company stock to drop making it difficult for the firm to raise additional capital for investment

- Compensation can also be affected, particularly if they have been issued stock

- These pressures sometimes leads managers to focus on short term results at the expense of the long term success of their organizations or engage in unlawful or unethical behavior that misleads investors

When will competition be more intense within an industry?

When there are many direct competitors.

When the product or service cannot be differentiated.

When a company uses an employment agency to hire part-time workers during periods of unpredictable needs, the company is

buffering

independent strategies

when it acts on its own to influence stakeholders or change some aspect of its current environment

- Competitive aggression
- Competitive Pacification
- Public Relations
- Voluntary Action
- Legal Action
- Political Action

Strong culture

Alignment, Authenticity.

one in which everyone understands and believes in the firm's goals, priorities, and practices.

It can be a real advantage to the organization if the behaviors it encourages and facilitates are appropriate.

In contrast, a strong culture that encourages inappropriate behaviors can severely hinder an organization's ability to deal effectively with its external environment particularly if the environment is undergoing change, as is almost always the case today.

A culture that was suitable and even advantageous in a prior era may become counterproductive in a new environment.

Competitive aggression

exploiting a distinctive competence or improving internal efficiency for competitive advantage

Competitive Pacification

independent action to improve relations with competitors

Public Relations

establishing and maintaining a relationship between an organization and the public

Voluntary Action

voluntary commitment to various interest groups, causes, and social problems

Legal Action

engaging company in private legal battle

Political Action

efforts to influence elected representatives to create a more favorable business environment or limit competition

Three general considerations that helps guide management's response to the environment

1. mManagers need to change what matters and can be changed

2. Managers should use the most appropriate response

3. Managers should choose responses that offer the most benefit at the lowest cost

components of the competitive environment

- Rivalry among existing competitors

- Threat of new entrants

- Threat of substitute and Complementary products

- Bargaining power of suppliers and buyers

Actions and attitudes that provide excellent customer service include

- Speed of filling and delivering orders

- Willingness to meet emergency needs

- Merchandise delivered in good condition

- Readiness to take back defective goods and resupply quickly

- Availability of installation and repair services and parts

- Service charges

switching costs

fixed costs buyers face when they change suppliers

The macroenvironment includes which of the following?

The economy

Technology

Demographics

regulators

The specific government organizations in a firm's more immediate task environment are known as

Which of the following is NOT a regulatory agency with the power to investigate company practices and take legal action to ensure compliance with laws?

U.S. Chamber of Commerce (USCC)

How does immigration affect the U.S. workforce?

Some immigrants have different educational and occupational backgrounds from the rest of the labor force.

It will make the labor force more ethnically diverse in the future.

According to Porter's model of the competitive environment, successful managers do more than simply react to the environment; they

act in ways that actually shape or change the organization's environment

A barrier to entry a company might encounter is

capital requirements

Supply Chain Management

the managing of the network of facilities and people that obtain materials from outside the organization, transform them into products, and distribute them to customers

The goal of supply chain management is to

have the right product in the right quantity available at the right place at the right cost

organizational cultures

clan, adhocracy, market, hierarchy

clan culture

internal focused, values flexibility rather than stability, encourages collaboration among employees

directives flow from trust, tradition, and long term commitment

leaders tend to act as mentors and facilitators

adhocracy culture

external focus and values flexibility

emphasizes growth, change, and innovation

leaders tend to be entrepreneurial

market culture

"rational" focused on external environment, values stability and control, driven by competition and a strong desire to deliver results

hierarchy culture

internally oriented by more focus on control and stability

values and norms associated with bureaucracy

Managers can take several approaches to managing culture. Which of the following is one of these approaches?

Celebrate and reward members who behave in ways that exemplify the desired culture

A company might decide to develop scenarios for which of the following purposes?

To list initiatives it can eliminate if necessary in an economic downturn

To identify possible new investments in an economic upturn

To have contingency plans in the case of a serious accident

Methods that permit the technical core to adapt to changes in the environment are called ______ processes.

flexible

Are approaches used by an organization that acts on its own to influence stakeholders or change some aspect of its current environment?

a company uses independent strategies when it acts on its own to influence stakeholders or change some aspect of its current environment.

When a company acts on its own to change some aspect of its current environment it is using strategies?

A company uses independent strategies when it acts on its own to change some aspect of its current environment.

Are organizations that are affected by and in turn affect their external environments?

Organizations are open systems that are affected by, and in turn affect, their external environments. Organizations receive financial, human, material, and information resources from the environment; transform those resources into finished goods and services; and then send those outputs back into the environment.

What is an organizations conscious efforts to change the boundaries of its competitive environment?

Strategic maneuvering is the organization's conscious efforts to change the boundaries of its task environment.