Business discussion topics and frameworks

Business Discussion

Explain the purpose of a vision and mission statements? What is their value for the strategic management process? Select an example of strong Vision/Mission (cite - include credible source). What are its positive characteristics?

Taken together the vision and mission statements of an organization serve to galvanize purpose and primary objectives with the long-term values of the business. Vision and mission statements need to create a unified, highly collaborative culture if an organization is to succeed. The larger and more diverse the organization's business model, the simpler the vision and mission statements need to be for high levels of communication, collaboration and trust to be established an grow. By definition vision statements define the purpose and values of an organization. The best vision statements provide employees with a very clear view of what is most important to the organizations and in the ones that are excellent, a clear sense of what employees are responsible for contributing. Great vision statements can galvanize entire workforces to compelling long-term goals, as Apple's Steve Jobs when he created the first Apple Macintosh for example.

A mission statement provides a clear definition of the enterprise's purpose and its main goals and objectives. It is often used as a means to unify a diverse set of stakeholders throughout an enterprise, providing them all with a clear view of what value is being generated and for whom. WalMart Corporations' mission statement "We save people money so they can live better" (WalMart Investor Relations, 2013) is an example of one the high volume retailer uses to unify its diverse supply chain, logistics, pricing and services businesses to a common goal.

Describe how Microsoft Corporation has maintained competitive advantage using the resource-based model of above average returns (150 words).

Microsoft's greatest competitive strength is its ability to transform the complex and often intricate needs of software users into succinct, reliable software. To accomplish this, the company actively uses the resource-based model of above-average returns. One of Microsoft's core competencies is the ability to quickly parse through terabytes of data and define unique software capability while assigning resources to their transformation into salable software (Gomes, 2009). By doing this, Microsoft traverses the resource-based model of above-average returns to create a unique, highly differentiated ecosystem of software development (Wall Street Journal, 2012).

In conjunction with this approach to development, Microsoft actively relies on an agile development methodology that quickly takes only the most relevant customer inputs during each product iteration, including them in test runs of their applications (Gomes, 2009). This ensures a very high level of quality and the ability to recursively test software across previous generations to isolate just what change caused the current iteration of software to fail (Wall Street Journal, 2012). Microsoft also uses the resource-based model of above average returns to continually monitor competitors, sales channels, and most importantly customer and new technological changes . All of these elements are included in how the resource-based model of above-average returns is implemented in the world's largest software company (Gomes, 2009).

Compare Google with Facebook. In terms of the five forces of competition, how are these companies competing against each other?

Google and Facebook are competing on several fronts the most significant being social networks and content aggregation including contextual search. Both Google and Facebook compete across social networks, yet long-term the greater competitive rivalry will be in the areas of aggregated and contextual search (Wall Street Journal, 2012). The five forces of competition including bargaining power of customers, threat of new entrants, threat of substitute products and bargaining power of suppliers all combine to define the competitive rivalry in an industry (Porter, 2008). In the social networking areas of Google and Facebook's competitive direction the bargaining power of customers is exceptionally strong as their loyalty drive advertisement revenues for both businesses (Wall Street Journal, 2012). And advertising revenue is the strongest source of revenue each company has. The secondary area of competitive rivalry is aggregated and contextual search (Gomes, 2009). The dominant competitive force on this dimension of their business is the threat of substitute products. As the pace of technological change continues to accelerate, both Facebook and Google will face significant competition on this area of their business models.