Strategic Management Strategy and Leadership

Strategic Management

Strategy and Leadership in Strategy and Human Resources

Define business level strategy. Choose any firm and identify its business level strategy and support its answer.

Business level strategy is primarily about defining how to attain a competitive advantage against other businesses in a particular market. For instance, some firms, such as Wal-Mart "can be very profitable going for quantity where economies of scale come into play." (Consumer Psychologist, 2004) Rather than focusing on a specific product or even a fixed image for it store this business has instead attempted to maximize its retailing reach purely by developing "responsive marketing programs" to maximize at every single step of the distribution chain "the channel's end-market impact and efficiency." (Retail Forward, 2004) Its competitive advantage in department store retailing is to sell a large array of low-cost products in a single location to time pressed consumers in areas with few shopping districts such as the Midwest.

Q2. Distinguish between strategic leadership and external leadership. Give an example of each type.

Strategic leadership deals with the moment-by-moment management of a business, such as deciding to position a particular product in a particular market first, before distributing it worldwide, in contrast to external forms of leadership that oversee the strategic decisions and attempt to shape them into a coherent and singular vision.

Q3. What type of firms have corperate level strategy? What does cooperate level strategy usually deal with. Provide an example.

Corporate level strategy affects firms that purvey a wide variety of products and are very diverse in their reach. Fundamentally, this area of strategy is concerned with the selection of businesses in which the company should compete in each of its specific divisions, how it should allocate funds amongst those divisions, and with the development of a strategy to compete with those competitive businesses in a holistic strategy for the firm.

Corperate level strategy stands in contrast to product level strategy that deals with the company as a whole. For instance, although Coke purveys a highly profitable product in the form of Coca-Cola, it only dominate the product market with this cola product, while Pepsi's Mountain Dew, 7-Up, and all its other beverages trump Coke's products on a corporate level. The Classic Coke product must retain a superior advantage to regular Pepsi, but the 'un-cola' market of clear, decaffeinated sodas would deploy a different strategy because Slice is less well-known and profitable than the Pepsi's 7-Up, thus Coke's corporate level strategy would be how to managing these two different market approaches, going on at the same time. (Quick MBA, 2004)

Q4. Choose any 3 leaders and discuss the actions that they took or their personal characteristic that you think influenced firm's strategy.

Sam Walton's desire to offer the best prices, all the time at his Wal-Mart, rather than high-low pricing like K-mart's Edward Lampert that requires printing costly circulars and newspaper ads to advertise special deals, indicate Walton's revolutionary de-emphasizing of marketing specific products as inexpensive in contrast to Lampert's stress on making consumers think they got a special deal as an incentive. (Haber, "It's a Lean Operation," 2003)

However, within the K-Mart empire, ironically, Martha Stewart has deployed an effective branding strategy of her Waspy image of good living, combined with quality products, that have resulted in continued product loyalty, despite her financial woes.