Disruptive Innovation
Essays

Describe a process that you believe would foster innovation in the workplace. Be sure to focus on a process, not just summarize course or research materials.

Business success is less a function of grandiose predictions than it is a result of being able to respond rapidly to real changes as they occur. That's why strategy has to be dynamic and anticipatory. (Welch, 2001)

The foundations of the Wal-Mart value chain and its global success is predicated on how well this company aligns every internal system and strategy to their unique value proposition of Low Price Everyday (LPED) leadership. This unique value proposition galvanizes the mission and vision statement of Wal-Mart and is one of the foundations of their success and continued growth. Their competitors give lip-service to price competition yet only Wal-Mart has engrained the LPED value proposition deep into their logistics, supply chain management (SCM), supply chain planning and optimization, advanced pricing, real-time logistics and most of all, in-store retail operations. Wal-Mart also is a very analytics, and metrics-driven company, measuring every aspect of their operations with a focus on continual process performance improvement. Wal-Mart sees the LPED value proposition as critical to their functioning as a continually improving business, continually striving for greater efficiency and performance gains over time. Wal-Mart evaluates each product line, retail location, distribution center and supplier with a strict series of analytics and metrics to ensure performance meets standards while also looking for opportunities for improving the area itself (Wal-Mart Investor Relations, 2012). Wal-Mart believes passionately that all of these factors must be captured in analytics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to support their mission statement which is "to help people save money so they can live better" (Mcginn, 2009) (Wal-Mart Investor Relations, 2012).

The traditional processes and roles of journalism are going through disruptive economic, social and political change as a result of the pervasive influence and impact of the Internet and social media. The nature of journalism itself is changing fast as the accumulated effects of the Internet reorder the economics of this industry (Thiel, 2005). With the rapid shifts in the underlying technologies increasing the speed of reporting, there is a corresponding shift in how news is produced and published (Nancy, 2000). With the accelerating speed of reporting there however have been continual challenges surrounding accountability and ethics (Overholser, 2009). Balancing the convenience and speed of the Internet as a publishing platform and the unique, highly targeted nature of social media for reaching multiple audiences into journalism continues to revolutionize the reader experience (Murdoch, 2010). The intent of this analysis is to provide a historical context as to how the Internet is changing journalism today, what the key technologies are that are impacting journalism, and assess the impact of social media on the journalism profession. Historical Analysis of Journalism in the Internet Age The Internet has swiftly progressed from a news-gathering platform to a publishing medium (Loop, 1999) This transition has drastically re-ordered the economics of news reporting and analysis, and also has led to entirely unforeseen ethical, legal and regulatory implications of journalistic practices and integrity (Nancy, 2000). Amidst all of these shifts in the industry structure and potential for profitability has been the rise of independent journalists who are often given equal or even greater attention and readership from the public. Rupert Murdoch sees the growth of the Internet as inexorable and completely capable of re-defining the economics of traditional news gathering, analysis, reporting and syndication (Murdoch, 2010). The fact that many bloggers have more loyal audiences that even the most well-known journalists is a case in point. The inflexion point for the journalism industry began when the Internet and its rapid publishing platforms including blogs, Wikis, video blogs and podcasts collectively created a foundation of trusted content faster and with greater candidness than traditional journalists could (Picard, 2009). Paralleling this shift in trust from the traditional journalists to the blogger community was increasing scrutiny of just how unbiased traditional journalists were. During election years as 2012 has been in the United States there is also the question of just how unbiased the traditional journalists are with regard to reporting the policies and platforms of presidential candidates (Picard, 2009). What's emerging from this analysis of traditional versus online media is the question of accuracy, authenticity, and trustworthiness of each type of media. Traditional media outlets that veer in the far left and right of political views as Fox News has been known to do for example illustrate this dichotomy.

Staying in step with customer and client needs is more than fulfilling their requests on a periodic basis and meeting their basic expectations, as any company that excels in client management understands. It is the ability to align every aspect of an enterprise to the needs and expectations, experiences and requirements of clients. Often internally-based organizations including those that are given the objective of being client-focused, end up paradoxically being the most myopic and inward-focused, resistant to change. Any organization that is experiencing this is in danger of losing the most valuable relationships and trust they have with customers. As leaders must continually push accountability, ownership and a clear sense of responsibility for results to the front lines of their enterprises, when traditional management and leadership strategies fail to deliver results, change is required. The intent of this analysis is to provide prescriptive guidance on how leaders can manage this level of disruptive change, defining how managing and leading are vastly different. It is often said that a manager is what one does, and a leader is who one is. The CEO attempting to lead this change management effort or strategy will have to contend with powerful political forces internally that managers who believe in command-and-control will use to subvert and force this initiative to fail. Managers who are accustomed to command-and-control will also fight for their political power base in the organization, despite the fact their often authoritarian and transactional leadership styles are highly ineffective in transforming organizations. The wealth of studies completed on change management indicate that a CEO with Emotional Intelligence (EI) and transformational leadership skills is the most powerful change agent there is in any organization or enterprise (Fitzgerald, Schutte, 2010) (Yarberry, 2007). The CEO needs to model the behavior that is needed to assist these managers in moving beyond their often highly charged political agenda of internal power to realize that by becoming more transformational as leaders they significantly open up their own potential professional growth in the process. The best transformational leaders can more focused on the win-win of personal and professional development also benefiting the organization (Lewis, 1996). These factors are all critically important for the leader looking to bring transformative change to their client organization. Implicit in the structural change of the organization is the even more powerful and potentially disruptive political one. For the leader to be effective in making these changes, they will have to exhibit a very high level of EI, transformational leadership and show a compelling vision of the future, all built on a strong foundation of trust (Wilbanks, 2011).

Why Entrepreneurship is Important to the American Economy

How Cloud-Based Technologies Are Impacting Database Technologies

Strategies and Courses of Action at Wal-Mart

In the Harvard Business Review article, Profit Pools: A Fresh Look At Strategy (Gadiesh, Gilbert, 1998) the authors provide a series of examples of how companies faced with daunting competition, consolidating markets experiencing exceptional price competition and erosion, and a very myopic focus on profitability were able to find profit pools and grow. The companies included in the analysis completed by the authors include Budget, Gucci, Hertz-Penske, Ryder and U-Haul. The authors have anchored their analysis with examples that clearly illustrate how many of the world's leading companies are blind to greater opportunities for profitable growth by only focusing on a specific area of their value chains instead of its entire breadth of opportunities (Gadiesh, Gilbert, 1998). They have defined a profit pool as the total amount of profits that are earned in an industry across all points of its value chain. Included is a particularly well-done analysis of the PC Industry value chain, showing the dominance of microprocessor development followed by software and services. As Dell would find out, the PC industry is more of an integrative function that inherently doesn't have the value-add potential of Intel for example (Gadiesh, Gilbert, 1998). The innate structure of an industry will often dictate the trajectory of growth or decline and composition of profit pools over time as well. The series of examples throughout this analysis make these points very clear with regard to profit pool analysis and their implications on the current and future stability and viability of industries and the companies who compete in them. The following section of this assessment of the research in Profit Pools: A Fresh Look At Strategy illustrates a series of valuable lessons learned for companies who are competing in the industries mentioned. The lessons learned are also directly applicable to firms in industries that resemble the structure of the auto, PC manufacturing and distribution, high-end luxury goods (Gucci) and the truck and moving rental businesses.

The proposed research study will examine the impact of integrating video technology in classroom lessons on the achievement of students. In this study, consideration will also be given to students' perceptions of the impact of integrated video on their achievement and gender-based differences in achievement related to the integration of video into classroom lessons. Today's students have grown up in an ever changing visual world. With the evolution of television, video cameras, cell phones, GPS navigational systems, and gaming systems there is video everywhere you look. Our students in the twenty-first century have been exposed to some form of video technology in almost every aspect of their lives. Why would it not follow that the use of audio/visual technology in the classroom would help improve student achievement?