It is precisely because the company decentralized its controlling brands into less bulky packages that the CEO could streamline their production process and achieve greater results. However, the Hard Rock Cafe article showed exactly the opposite business strategy. Whereas traditionally all Hard Rock Cafe's and Hotels provided their own entertainment, the new strategy that Hard Rock is attempting to create will link many of these operations together through the internet and digital feeds. They argue that this will allow customers from local venues to experience the large venue attractions that Hard Rock is known for. They in effect believe that greater integration of its basic operations is the key to success. This is a sound and logical strategy, because the importance of providing "big time entertainment" in local venues is a very appealing and proven method for getting more customers. Hard Rock's consolidation strategy allows them to go to the heart of its problem, which is to revitalize its company and turn it into a more modern appeal rather than its traditional emphasis on classical rock music. Finally, the third article looks at the bigger picture by looking at the reasons many different companies across a spectrum failed and the inevitable changing of leadership when this occurs. This article articulates the danger of not having one solid vision, which is to say that sometimes companies just take the wrong approach to their market or "back the wrong horse" which inevitably causes them to lose revenue. The lesson that these three articles teaches me is that there are many different ways to achieve the similar goal of creating an evolutionary business. The solution is never a one-fit-all type of scenario. It is necessary to apply different strategies to different industries rather than attempt to stubbornly stick with the same strategy across different industries. Adidas and Hard Rock have both used evolutionary...
The key to having a successful practice is to have the vision to understand and prepare for both times of bounty and frugality. For companies that do not do this, such as pseudo.com cited in one of the articles, the company inevitably fails. Therefore to understand business management is to not only look at case studies attempt to find out what makes a particular business successful, but extract the overall themes of what makes all successful businesses cutting edge. The implicit lesson from all of these articles is that business is about vision and having great vision is about being able to break down a company into many different parts and recognize how to put it together to streamline its production cycle, supply-chain, and overall branding strategy.
On a personal level I learned from these articles that corporate strategies are shaped by the particular business, rather than strategies shaping business. The essential difference between these two interpretations was something that I have never really thought about until case studies across these three different articles. Business, as a living organism grows and matures, it never stays stagnant and nor does the market that it operates in. Therefore, I must treat business like any evolutionary science, to observe what changes need to be made to shape business to the cultural, social and political policies of the modern era rather than keep analyzing them based on their past laurels.
