L18: Marketing strategy Implementation and Control Flashcards
Challenges when managing global firms:
- Integrating global production activities
- Making efficiency gains from global scale
- Learning across boundaries
- Developing national responsiveness
- Locating the central hub
- Devising global structure
- Coping with cultural diversity
Culture definition (OED)
the ideas, customs, and social behavior of a particular people or society; the attitudes and behavior characteristic of a particular social group.
Culture’s influences on the strategy
Step 1: Improve implementation
Step 2: Reconstruct or develop a new strategy
Step 3: Change of culture
Improve implementation by
Lowering cost, improving accepted ways of doing things, and tightening control
Reconstruct or develop a new strategy
Extending the market for businesses but operating in the same way they have been used to.
=> Challenge: managers find themselves constraint by path-dependent organizational routines and assumptions or political processes.
Change of culture
Usually rare and triggered by dramatic evidence of the redundancy of that culture such as a financial crisis or market share loss.
The purpose of culture web
a tool to understand the paradigm of culture and its effects on organization
Culture web includes
Paradigm, symbols, power structure, organizational structures, stories, rituals and routine, control systems.
Paradigm
- Taken for granted assumptions held in common.
- Difficult to observe internally so the other 6 visible manifestations help.
- Ex: a problem in an engineering firm is a tendency of people to focus on technical excellence of the product.
Symbols
- Objects, events, acts or people that convey, maintain or create meaning over and above their functional purpose.
- Ex: car and job titles are also the signals for status and hierarchy.
Power structure
Ability of individuals or groups to persuade, induce or coerce others into following certain courses of action
Organizational structure
Roles, responsibilities and reporting relationships in organisations
Stories
- Being told by members to others.
- Ex: Successes, disasters, heroes, villains and mavericks.
Rituals and routines
- Rituals are particular activities or special events in organisational life that emphasise, highlight or reinforce what is important in culture.
Ex: traning programs, interview panels, etc. - Routines are ‘the way we do things around here’ on a day-to-day basis.
Ex: engineers often tell customers what they need rather than listening to their needs.
Control systems
- Formal and informal ways of monitoring and supporting people within and around an organisation.
- Includes measurements and reward systems.
- Ex: public-service organization’s control system is more about accounting for spending rather than service quality.
Five basic structural types
Functional, Multidivisional, Matrix, Transnational, Project
Functional structure
It divides responsibility according to the organization’s primary specialist roles.
Functional structure’s pros and cons
- Pros: Greater control since all information channel upwards, Clear definition of role and task, Provide concentration of expertise.
- Cons: Cannot cope with product/geographical diversity, Danger of information overloaded at the top; Failure to adapt; Senior managers neglect strategic issues; Coordination between functions is difficult.
Multidivisional structure
- It includes divisions on the basis of products, services or geographical areas.
- Example: Alphabet => Google, Google X, Venture, Nest, Calico
Multidivisional structure’s pros and cons
- Pros: Flexible (add or divest divisions); Specialisation of competences; Training to take a strategic view; Control division by performance; Great ownership of divisional strategy
- Cons: Fragmentation and non-cooperation; Lack of knowledge sharing; Danger of loss of central control when divisions become too autonomous; Duplication of central and divisions functions.
Worldwide area division >< Worldwide product division
- High need for local responsiveness.
- Little pressure to coordinate activities to exploit experience and location economies, and to transfer distinctive competencies abroad.
- Decentralised structure required.
Global matrix structure
Combines different structural dimensions simultaneously
Ex: Product + Geography.
- Strong pressures, Global learning and High pressure to be locally responsive
Global matrix structure’s pros and cons
- Pros: Promote knowledge-sharing; Flexible for allowing different dimensions to be mixed together.
- Cons: Hard to control; Longer time to reach decisions; High degree of conflict; Unclear jobs and tasks, cost and profit responsibilities.
=> Managers must be good at sustaining collaborative relationship and coping with ambiguity/messiness it can bring.
Transnational structure
It combines local responsiveness and global coordination. Simultaneous ability to achieve global competences, local responsiveness, and organization-wide innovation and learning.
