 Well hello everyone and welcome back to our part two of business 501 unit four review this is corporate strategy now if you haven't joined us before you can find the links to the old videos down below as well as a link to the course itself which you should take along with this because this is just a supplemental bit of material. Just a reminder for everyone I know it says down below me that we are live every Monday that is not true we will be coming to you next week on Wednesday June 1st instead of the usual Monday it's a holiday here in America I will say that multiple times I also think I have it written down in the description but now that we've done that I'm just going to hand it over to Dr. Portalees to get us going. All right thank you very much hi everybody I hope everything is going going well as Mike mentioned we're just picking up where we left off on unit four and if you recall we started talking about some different specific strategies that organizations can can apply and of course all of this is after you've done that internal analysis the external analysis you figured out what your competitive advantage is so this is really the last step in the strategy process is to ultimately apply apply everything that you've learned as as you've gone throughout throughout the process so today I want us to talk a little bit about one of the ways that organizations or one of the strategies they might use and that is the idea that they really want to grow and this strategy can be really really effective especially in certain sectors of the market and there are four phases that I want us to talk about as far as the growth model goes so the first phase is the concept and development so you have this new product or service that that you're in the process of developing in order to to obviously make your company grow so during this phase one of the challenges or a few of the challenges actually that we see are listed here on this slide so of course development of the idea that can definitely be a challenge you look at prototyping if it's a product lots of testing that type of thing and then another challenge here is investment support for the idea so if your company doesn't have the money to create this new product or service you may need to find investors to help you do that and that can that can definitely be a challenge within this phase so you've gone through concept and development you have this great product or service now you want to commercialize it so what I mean by that is that we develop it the product or the service for introduction into the market so we've already tested it we've developed the idea now we really want to set up our organization for success to be able to produce to produce that item a couple of the challenges here in this phase include getting everything set up so organizing all of those moving parts and those moving pieces as you as you commercialize your product and also market entry can be a challenge as well so ultimately figuring out how to best market that product or service that you've developed can can often and sometimes be a challenge also this is usually the phase especially if it's a product where you may run into technical issues and I guess it's that's true for for services also service products but where maybe the product that you developed isn't working like how you thought it would so maybe you're finding challenges there which is okay because you're just commercializing it you haven't actually sold it to the public yet so it's not ideal but to find a variety of issues at this phase is is fairly common and it's okay because you still have time to to ultimately solve them so let's look at phase three and phase four so phase three is is the growth phase so this is where you know you've gone through the process of developing the product and service and now you're really just focusing on selling that product so companies struggle a little bit in this phase with trying to produce the larger quantities enough to meet the the demand also trying to keep quality as they are creating more and more products a greater quantity of products and also expanding the market share so really entering into that market that maybe you're not familiar with can be a challenge and then also in any kind of growth model there there are personnel issues or employee issues maybe you can't get enough people to fill the jobs that you have you you have a lot of training to do there are a lot of things that must happen in this phase to to make it successful so finally when we look at phase four this is our stability phase so here we're really looking at consolidating our market position and and we may end up developing we may end up developing new products during this phase as well which of course then starts us back at the beginning of this cycle but what's what's good about this is that you've done all of that up front work and now hopefully your product is selling you have all of the systems in place that need to be in place to make that successful but of course one of the challenges here is as you're looking at developing other products and services you're also having to manage those and manage new products that are in the beginning of the growth phase so that's probably the biggest challenge that that we might encounter here I'd like to stop there this was a lot of information and see if if anybody has questions I'm here in the chat for everyone if they have any questions I don't see any questions right now I just remind you you can put them in the chat up but we'll give everyone just a second right now if they if they have any questions it doesn't look like we have any questions right now so we're just I'm just going to hand it back over to Dr. Portales and again if anyone has any questions you can put them in the chat to the side or if you're watching later feel free to leave them in the comments down below but I'm going to just hand it back over all right thank you so I'm so still talking about growth here as as a potential strategy there are some other problems and challenges that I want us to to discuss and it's not that these challenges or problems are going to hinder our ability to grow it's just there are things that we want to be aware of so that we can address those issues before they actually happen if you are trying to trying to grow your organization so the first thing that I want us to talk about is that sometimes companies will choose products or markets that don't have a lot of room for growth so the market may already be saturated with lots of similar products which makes it really really difficult to compete in that market and just to give you a bit of a reminder here this is a lot of why we do all of that internal and external external analysis like SWAT we talked about that a couple weeks ago pastel analysis because at that phase we would have discovered that that maybe this product that we're trying to enter into the market is already saturated and then perhaps we would have chosen to go a different direction so doing as a as a company doing research is extremely important to try to eliminate some of some of these strategy problems that we're discussing here um another important thing to remember and we haven't talked too much about it yet in this course is that really any kind of strategy requires the right people so we really depend on our employees to ultimately meet our strategic goals you know if we are the CEO of an organization we're not there all the time we're not in the really engaging directly with the customers and that type of thing so we want to make sure that whatever strategy we choose especially if it's a growth one that we have the right people and they're trained properly and they're on board with the strategy they support the strategy and of course the same is true with any type of leadership and management in the organization too they you need to have the right people in place in order to make that successful another important thing to think about is when you're implementing a growth strategy you want to make sure all functions within your organization are in alignment with that strategy so finance accounting human resource management the individual department strategies should be very much aligned with the overall growth and organizational strategy that has been chosen and they all work together of course as as you already know so if one department really isn't on board with a particular strategy the strategy is less likely to be effective especially when it's a growth strategy so we just want to make sure that there is clear alignment there in all of the functional areas of of our organization we also want to manage growth so while it may seem great to grow really fast there are lots of challenges as you can imagine associated with that in terms of you want to be able to manage that growth you don't want it to explode and be too big where it becomes unwieldy and you don't have systems and processes in place in order to deal with it so while we don't want it too fast we also don't want it to the growth too slow so we want to try to find a balance there as we implement the strategy specifically for for growth marketing of course having the right marketing strategies is is definitely key in all of this and that definitely speaks to our third bullet point the alignment of a growth strategy with other strategies so marketing usually is a department in of itself and we want to make sure that the chat strategies that we've chosen specifically for for growth are really in alignment with with how we're going to move forward and market and we also want to have systems in place for for accounting and finance and we talked a little bit if you recall about mergers and acquisitions last time so if if that is one way that we are going to grow by acquiring other companies we want to be aware of potential culture issues and I mean company culture in that sense where when you're trying to merge these two companies there are different perspectives and different beliefs so just having an awareness of that before the merger or acquisition can can assist us in in dealing with those problems ultimately should they occur okay I want to I want us to talk a little bit about this idea from minnsburg and I think this is important and actually really really interesting the the idea behind it is that strategies should actually come from the bottom and not from the top of the organization so minnsburg makes the argument that the first line employees that are working with your customers and producing and that kind of thing are actually the ones that probably have a better idea of what your strategy should be so it's a really interesting philosophy I think in that personally speaking I think that he could be right about that but oftentimes we see strategy come from the top of an organization so you know the CEO and the vice presidents and that type of thing but so having said that let's talk a little bit about his theory on on strategy so he says that the five piece of strategy the first one is that you have to plan we already know that we've talked a lot about planning for strategy development and a lot of the background work that we do on internal and external analysis so plan is definitely our first step and the first thing that we want to think about as we think about our intended course of action the second P is purpose which is a consistent stream of actions as far as minnsburg says it so we want to be driven with a purpose we want to have this strategy have a have a plan in place and and constantly make those changes as we drive toward toward the strategy that that is our that is our goal and minnsburg also talks about ploy as an important component to strategy as well and this is having plans at the tactical level so think of like a week to week plan in order to meet a strategy a longer term strategy so the ploy you want to have these tactical plans in place to make your strategy successful and that is again a really short time frame like maybe a week or a month think of that ultimately as having a to-do list of very specific things that you must do in order to to to implement that strategy our next P is position and position is relates a lot to competitive advantage which we spent almost a whole unit talking about so position is how does your company how does your organization compare to the competitors and other factors that that may be a play within that competitive arena or that competitive environment um finally he looks at perspective and he says that perspective is the personality of the organization as an important element to strategy so when you think about personality of the organization think about company culture think about the marketing campaigns that the organization uses those types of things would relate to the personality and of course when we implement a strategy we want to make sure that that's in alignment with the personality of our organization so those are his five piece of strategy and we've talked a lot about a variety of theories and I would say that while they're all important we want to look at them in combination most organizations won't use just one theory and move forward with a strategy based on that so we can kind of put all of these ideas together and combine them to to end up with the best strategy for us so I'd like to take a moment and see if there are any questions if you have questions please put them in the chat and we'll just take a minute or so for you to do that if you have anything come up we don't have any questions as of right now but uh just want to remind everyone that uh next week for our first review of unit five we will be on Wednesday June 1st same time as always for you wherever you are but uh it's a national holiday or so Wednesday next week June 1st I'll hand it back over to Dr. Portley to get us back and going all right thank you okay so the last thing that I want us to talk about in this session your readings discuss in a lot of detail as well and I think it's pretty important and that's the idea that really kind of taking a step back now and looking at the strategic planning process and looking at all of the steps that are involved within within that process so a lot of these steps we've actually already talked about but I want us to have um this bigger picture as we move forward within uh within the final unit unit five so the first step is to um as you already know is to establish the mission vision and values of the organization so every strategy and everything that you do in your company should support the mission the vision and the values of the organization so this is why it's a really important first step so a vision statement um a lot of times these are used interchangeably mission vision and values but they're really quite different so I want us to just talk for a couple minutes here about the the differences between them so a vision statement is a goal that is really really um think of it as um a future state so what would be the ideal thing that that your company that your company could do or would do um that's a little bit different from a mission statement in that a mission statement is a a little bit more specific than the vision and oftentimes is the how how we're going to do it so how are we going to meet the vision that that we've already stated within the vision statement and then finally we have values and a value statement is the beliefs that will govern the individual and the group all of the employees within the organization so these are the things that the company finds important such as um diversity how people are treated within a company um a lot of value statements will address um environmental concerns that type of thing so all of these ultimately will work together in order to uh help direct the the way that we should go in terms of our strategy so that's a mission vision and values so our next step is then to develop the objective so what what is it that we want to achieve and when we think about objectives think about them pretty long term um and that we also want to make sure that they're measurable so we want to know at the end if we met our goals or not um that's why they should definitely be measurable so once you've set your objectives we're going to look at the external environment and the internal environment too so that's where that SWAT analysis is that we talked about a few weeks ago and also pestle analysis um so really looking at all of the changes that occur or the changes that could occur in the internal and external environment um like technology night like new laws um all of those things uh could uh likely positively or negatively impact our business so we just want to have an awareness of those and as we already mentioned um looking at the capabilities of our organization uh and any deficiencies we can apply a SWAT analysis to that so that is our third step and as we look here at our final two steps um we determine the competitive position um this is the same as competitive advantage so don't get confused there competitive position is basically the same thing as competitive advantage and uh we've talked a little bit already about value propositions a value proposition is what what are you offering with your product or service what what is the the advantage that a customer might get from using your product or your service so once you've determined the competitive position competitive advantage value proposition um then you'll want to look and really really um hone in on the competitive advantage so what are all of the characteristics that you can possibly list out that will help you market your product and look at maybe the types of skills that you need in human resources and how do you ultimately tie all of that together so the one thing that I do want you to consider when we look at the idea of competitive advantage is um that there can be tangible assets that create a competitive advantage for us but also intangible so a tangible asset might be a a physical building or equipment or something along those lines that we use within our operations but an intangible asset is equally as important that could be a good reputation with our customers it could be a very recognizable brand so when we look at really digging into the competitive advantage looking at the tangible assets that we have as well as those intangible are really important to to divide those and and consider them because sometimes companies will only look at the tangible ones when really the intangible ones can provide a lot of value and and provide a pretty big source of competitive advantage for us so at this point that finishes us up for unit four and we'll come back next time next Wednesday as Mike has uh has stated and we will start unit five and spend two weeks on on unit five and just keep plugging away and keep reading through the course and in the meantime are there any questions that I can answer oh we do have a question right uh right now about um the importance uh the importance of difference between tangible and intangible aspect and assets which which would which is more important oh gosh you know I think a lot of that depends on the company um itself but since we are so technology driven and a lot of the technologies that um our our our companies use can create a pretty big intangible competitive advantage so if I had to say and this is just my personal opinion from my experience for most companies I think intangible is more important because that can get us a more competitive place in the market that we're competing in whereas tangible assets unless we have a whole lot of them you know unless we're a really really wealthy company and we have a lot of money that we can spend and and do things and oh you know create new products I think the intangible assets um are more important in my opinion all right cool yeah um we we have someone else down here in the chat just kind of uh reading reiterating the the idea about intangible assets but I will let everyone if that if you anyone has any questions if if that's more uh if we need more clarity on that feel free to hit me up in the chat right now I'll give you a little bit of time while I remind everyone that next week uh we're starting unit five and that's going to be on Wednesday June 1st we'll go back to Monday the next week but we have a holiday um here in America so we're shuffling things around so Wednesday June 1st part one of our review of business 501 we gotta thank you down there in the chat so I think you answered the question properly so I'm just going to get everyone out of here by saying if uh this is your first time here and you've made it all the way through this um check out the other videos in the playlist below and make sure you check out the course because again this is supplemental material for the course I want to thank everyone for joining us I would like to thank Dr. uh Laura Poitlis for taking us through everything and I'm I will see y'all next week on Wednesday June 1st bye everybody