5 Case Scenarios
There is a Chinese saying:
“Know thy-self, know thy competition, and get it right almost every time.
Know thy-self, not know thy competition, and get it right about half the time.
Not know thy-self, not know thy competition, and get it wrong almost every time. “
“Knowledge is what you are after. Information is the raw material you use.
Intelligence is what finds and processes information.”
1st Scenario
“Negative Voices Hinders Success”
Presenting Situation:
Ms. Rosie, general manager of “Princess” Restaurant, has been concerned about her business’ performance. She has three branches located at Manila, Makati and Lucban, Quezon. Makati and Lucban branches were doing well but her branch at Manila gives her so many problems. Manila branch was not able to meet their quota and face problems in her employees’ attitude and attendance. Mr. Joel, the branch manager, didn’t able to answer those questions asked during the general meeting with the GM. He doesn’t give proper solution to the given situation/problem and he doesn’t even make any decision without asking Ms. Rosie.
Current Situation:
Mr. Joel, 25years old, personally, boyfriend of Ms. Rosie. He has no experience of being a manager or any position in a business. He was hired because he was personal connection with the general manager.
During the initial interview, Mr. Joel observed several piles of dirty plates and utensils at the kitchen. Mr. Joel expressed his self-doubt and fear which interfere with his ability to achieve or set goals. Self-doubt and fear are the voices in his head telling him, "You'll never succeed, so why try?" and "who do you think you are?" Self-doubt and fear are also what makes him listen to those voices and decide to give up before he get started.
Issues:
• Hiring incompetent personnel or with no experience
• Cognitive Ability in Managing Business
• Self-Doubt and Fear
Solution:
Better Human Resource Planning
Core Competency #6 Personal and Professional Development
Core Competency #7 Quality Improvement
Instead of trying to fit the person to the organization, work from the organization and ask, "What do we need? Regardless of the tools you use, the single indispensable element to CI is the human factor: the smarts, experience, and instinct that can turn huge collections of dead facts into live intelligence that plays a central part in making business decisions. The best competitive intelligence team, experts agree, is one that is distributed, involving the company’s entire workforce. Competitive analysis is critical for managers formulating corporate or divisional strategies. Executives and planners must be aware of the levels and trends in performance of their competitors to determine the best direction for their divisions and parent corporations. They also must be capable of critically assessing their own organization’s performance, over time, relative to its competitive peers.
Core Competency #6 Personal and Professional Development
Another solution is, if the general manager really wants her boyfriend to remain in that position, she needs to have her boyfriend a personal and professional development. Self-doubt and fear interfere with his ability to achieve or set goals. Thus, he needs to overcome this and learn to silence the negative voices in his head that interfere with his ability to succeed. When he let self-doubt and fear rule his life, he definitely miss opportunities. he predict and believe that nothing good will happen to him, so he don't try anything new, and refuse to take even low-level risks. This leads to discount people or situations that could help him reach his goals. While self doubt and fear can come in different forms and from different sources, he can learn to break through them.
2nd Scenario:
“The Leakage”
Presenting Situation:
Organization “Y” works hard to compete, but somehow the competitor is always one step ahead. Each time “Y” introduces a new product or service, the competitor keeps beating “Y” to the punch.
Current Situation:
An independent research firm has called your Marketing Manager, indicating he is doing some research about your industry. He asks questions about your market share, key customers, and other confidential type information. Another common method is to send a survey to your company from a company seeking to do business with you. The survey seeks “inside” information about your company.
Issues:
• Ineffective management of resources and strategies
• Confidentiality and Privacy
• Improper Communication
Solution:
Core competency #9 Record Management
Whether you realize it or not, you are under some form of intelligence attack. If you fail to recognize these attacks, they will manifest themselves in a very dramatic way.
How can this keep happening? The answer is: The competitor is obtaining critical intelligence about your company as a result of leaks from your own people. Therefore, it is important to be on the look out for suspicious phone calls, unusual surveys, inquiries from regulators that are out of the ordinary, or anything that requires abnormal disclosure on a voluntary basis.
Core competencies help with outsourcing options. Since organizational functions interact, there may be unintended consequences to outsourcing components of core competencies. We need to be careful for the valuable informations of the company.
Remember that Intelligence Attacks can come from a wide range of people – Lobbyists, Researchers, suppliers, Customers, Former Employees, Government Regulators, etc. each has its own agenda, so be watchful.
Once you begin to recognize intelligence attacks, you can counter-attack in many ways. The most common tactic is to buy time and delay the attacker, allowing you to trace the attack back to the source. For example, when you receive an unusual phone call asking about critical information, simply tell the caller you are very busy and can you take their phone number and name. This buys time and gives you a trail back to the attacker. In some cases, you may need to throw the attacker off to expose his real motive or refer him to another source. The reason you want to do this is simple – you want to continue to monitor intelligence attacks. By conversing with the attacker in a fake maneuver, you leave the door open just enough to assess his intelligence attacks going forward.
3rd Scenario
“The First Cry of P&G”
Presenting Situation:
During fiscal 1985, Procter & Gamble experienced its first decline in earnings since 1953. Analysts maintained that Procter & Gamble's corporate structure had failed to respond to important changes in consumer shopping patterns and that the company's standard practice of extensive market research slowed its reaction to the rapidly changing market. The mass-marketing practices that had served Procter & Gamble so well in the past lost their punch as broadcast television viewership fell from 92 percent to 67 percent in the mid-1980s. Many large companies responded to the challenge of cable TV and increasingly market-specific media with appropriately targeted "micro-marketing" techniques, and Procter & Gamble was forced to rethink its marketing strategy.
Issues:
• “Changes” in Marketing World
Solution:
Core Competency #8 Research
Proctor and Gamble conducted different research which answered to the company’s problem. One of which is a research entitled “First Mover Advantages” which gave a great contribution to the company’s success.
Innovation is required for survival. Core competencies help to identify specific behaviors in the organization that are appropriate to strategy design. Let's face it: change isn't easy. Whether the change is positive or negative, chosen or imposed, it almost always causes stress, uncertainty, and general unease. Leaders need to be aware of the challenge change presents to their employees, whether dealing with lay-offs, mergers, retirement, or other changes in structure or approach.
This research surveyed theoretical and empirical research on mechanisms that confer advantages and disadvantages on first-mover firms. Mechanisms that promote first-mover advantages includes proprietary learning effects, patents, pre-emption of input factors and locations and the development of buyer switching costs.
Conducting research in a certain company is really important as one of the core competencies. The strategic management field emphasized a wider set of inter-firm differences. The implications of these differences is the context of mechanisms for first-mover advantage needs to be explored in greater depth but was able to provide a useful start to find a solution for a given problem. Through research, the company eventually innovated and developed a greater strategy to make them successful.
4th Scenario
“MANAGING TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS”
Because these growth engines provide the platforms for the next generation of products and processes, companies have to manage them better!
Presenting Situation:
Hospital A conducted a research for their new development technology project. But these basic research or fundamental knowledge-build projects are often mismanaged because the hospital employs the wrong process to manage them or apply inappropriate financial criteria for project selection resulting in few benefits to the company.
Hospital A replete with horrific stories about their huge technology projects that were cancelled prematurely, thus forgoing millions in potential profits.
Solution:
Core Competency #2 Management of Resources;
Core Competency #11Collaboration and Team Work;
Technology development projects are the foundation or platform for new products and new processes and thus are vital to the prosperity of the modern corporation. The business’ inability to handle these projects effectively also contributes to a reluctance to undertake more of them. In short, because this project was mismanaged, the result is often negative, which creates a real fear of ever undertaking such a project again! Management becomes risk averse.
Making the resource commitment decisions for TD projects, especially in the early stages should be consider. Here the project team declares what they hope to achieve in order for the project to be considered “a success.” Success criteria for TD projects include the achievement of certain technical results (e.g., positive lab test results) by a given date, attaining a certain technical performance improvement (e.g., a certain level of absorption in a new fiber technology), or the expected sales potential to be generated by the new technology (e.g., the size of the market that this technology might see potential in, if successful). Success criteria are declared relatively early in the project, and on this basis, gatekeepers approve the project at the early gates. These criteria are reviewed and updated at each successive gate; if the project falls short of these success criteria at the next gate, it may be killed—for example, if certain technical results were not achieved by a given date or gate. The trigger for the process is the first stage, involving discovery or idea generation. Quality ideas are essential to a successful technology program and thus technology ideas from multiple sources must be sought for consideration at Gate 1. While idea generation is often done by scientists or technical people, it can also be the result of other activities, such as:
• A strategic planning exercise, where strategic arenas are identified, and possible TD research directions are mapped.
• Technology forecasting and technology roadmapping.
• Brainstorming or group creativity sessions focusing on what might be.
• Scenario generation about future market and technological possibilities.
• Customer visitation programs and voice-of-customer initiatives.
• Active idea solicitation campaigns within the organization.
The use of success criteria allows the project team to develop customized criteria to suit their project; it forces the team to submit realistic rather than grandiose expectations, and it creates accountability for the project team—something to measure the team against.
5th Scenario
“Oh My Logo!”
Presenting Situation:
Former P&G logo
The company received unwanted media publicity in the 1980s when an urban legend spread that their previous corporate logo was a Satanic symbol. The accusation is based on a particular passage in the Bible, specifically Revelation 12:1, which states: "And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars." Since P&G's logo consists of a man's face on a moon surrounded by thirteen stars, some have claimed that the logo is a mockery of the heavenly symbol alluded to in the aforementioned verse, and hence the logo is Satanic. Where the beard meets the surrounding circle, a mirror image of the number 666 can be seen when viewed from inside the logo, and this has been interpreted as the reflected number of the beast, again linked to Satanism. Also, there are two horns like a lamb that are said to represent the false prophet.
An example of one such rumor was the fabricated account that the president of P&G had appeared on a Saturday edition of The Phil Donahue Show. He declared that he was a Satanist and that the company's logo was Satanic. This rumor circulated despite the facts that the company's president has never made such a statement in public, had never appeared on Phil Donahue's show, and that Donahue's show never ran on Saturdays. Later variations of this rumor replaced the Donahue show with Geraldo Rivera's show.
Issues:
• Logo Controversy
Solution:
Core Competency #10 Communication;
Core Competency #11Collaboration and Team Work;
These interpretations have been denied by company officials, and no evidence linking the company to the Church of Satan or any other occult organization has ever been presented. P & G do it in a legal way. P & G acts in accordance with the established norms and conduct of the institution/ organization and of the country’s law.
The company has sued and attempted to sue a number of companies and individuals who have spread rumors of this type, in some instances because they sell competitive products and have spread such rumors for the purpose of tarnishing P&G's image to increase sales of their own brands.
As stated in one of the resulting lawsuits, the logo originated in 1851 as the symbol for their Star brand of candles. It was later altered to show the man in the moon overlooking 13 stars, which were meant to commemorate the original 13 colonies.
However, the continuous media coverage prompted P&G to adopt an entirely new logo consisting of just the letters P&G. This controversy became their big problem in sales. So, they started to solve it through proper communication through meetings. Also, with collaboration and teamwork, they come up with a decision to change their logo to stop the controversy. They change their logo and come up with a better logo.
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