Week 1 Flashcards
How do you gain a competitive advantage?
You gain competitive advantage by being better than your competitors at doing valuable things for your customers. But what does this mean, specifically?
To succeed, what must managers deliver? The fundamental success drivers are innovation, quality, speed, and cost competitiveness.
What is innovation?
The introduction of new goods and services.
What is quality?
quality
The excellence of your product (goods or services).
Fast and timely execution, response, and delivery of results.
speed
Speed context
often separates the winners from the losers. How fast can you develop and get a new product to market? How quickly can you respond to customer requests? You are far better off if you are faster than the competition—and if you can respond quickly to your competitors’ actions.
Why is speed important?
Speed is no longer just a goal of some companies; it is a strategic imperative. Regarding quick delivery, Bruce Birnback, president of Rowe Furniture, said in November 2004, “Today it’s not critical, but 18 to 24 months from now, I believe it will be the difference between being in business and not.” 57
Cost Competitiveness
Keeping costs low in order to achieve profits and be able to offer prices that are attractive to consumers.
cost competitiveness
What is the most important factor concerning performance?
Don’t forget: Don’t focus on one aspect of performance and neglect the others. You might be better at or more interested in one than the others, but you should strive for all four.
The process of working with people and resources to accomplish organizational goals.
management
The management function of systematically making decisions about the goals and activities that an individual, a group, a work unit, or the overall organization will pursue.
planning
The management function of assembling and coordinating human, financial, physical, informational, and other resources needed to achieve goals.
organizing
The management function that involves the manager’s efforts to stimulate high performance by employees.
leading
The management function of monitoring performance and making needed changes.
controlling
Practices aimed at discovering and harnessing an organization’s intellectual resources.
knowledge management
How do you be an effective manager?
To be effective is to achieve organizational goals.
How do you become an efficient manager?
To be efficient is to achieve goals with minimal waste of resources, that is, to make the best possible use of money, time, materials, and people.
What are the four pillars of competitive advantage?
Innovation, speed,Quality, and cost.
What are the major way to change creating a competitive landscape?
Globalization, technical logical changes, knowledge management, and collaboration across organizational boundaries.
What are the four functions of management?
Planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.
What are the three aspects of planning?
Analyzing the situation, determining the goals, and deciding how to pursue those goals.
What are the two aspects to organizing?
Assembling the resources to complete the job,and coordinating employees and resources to maximum success.
What are the two aspects of leading?
Motivating people, and stimulating high performance.
What are the two aspects of controlling?
Controlling is monitoring the progress of the organization or the work unit toward goals, and then taking corrective action if necessary.
What are the three levels of management?
Top-level management, mid-level managers, and front-line managers.
What is the function of top-level managers?
Top-level, strategic managers are the senior executives and are responsible for the organization’s overall management.
What is the function of middle level managers?
Middle-level, tactical managers translate general goals and plans into more specific objectives and activities.
What is the function of front-line managers?
Frontline, operational managers are lower-level managers who supervise operations.
What are the three skills managers need to be effective?
Technical skills, conceptual and decision skills, and interpersonal and communication skills.
What are technical skills?
A technical skill is the ability to perform a specialized task involving a certain method or process.
What are conceptual and decision skills?
Conceptual and decision skills help the manager recognize complex and dynamic issues, analyze the factors that influence those issues or problems, and make appropriate decisions.
What are interpersonal and communication skills?
Interpersonal and communication skills enable the manager to interact and work well with people.
What are the hierarchy of managerial skills?
Technical skills are more important on the lower level. As managers rise in the organization technical skills become less important and conceptual decision making become more important. Conceptual and decision-making skills are needed on all levels.
What are the four goals to have a successful career?
Be both a specialist and a generalist;
be self-reliant but also connected;
actively manage your relationship with your organization;
and continuously improve your skills in order to perform in the ways demanded in the changing work environment
which includes legal, political, economic, technological, demographic, and social and natural factors that generally affect all organizations
macroenvironment
Organizations that are affected by, and that affect, their environment.
open systems
Goods and services organizations take in and use to create products or services.
inputs
The products or services organizations create.
outputs
The products or services organizations create.
All relevant forces outside a firm’s boundaries, such as competitors, customers, the government, and the economy.
external environment
The immediate environment surrounding a firm; includes suppliers, customers, competitors, and the like.
competitive environment
The most general environment; includes governments, economic conditions, and other fundamental factors that generally affect all organizations.
macro-environment
As competition increases what must managers focus on?
With increased competition, managers must pay particular attention to costs.
Conditions that prevent new companies from entering an industry.
barriers to entry
Fixed costs buyers face when they change suppliers.
switching costs
The managing of the network of facilities and people that obtain materials from outside the organization, transform them into products, and distribute them to customers.
supply chain management
Those who purchase products in their finished form.
final consumer
A customer who purchases raw materials or wholesale products before selling them to final customers.
intermediate consumer
The speed and dependability with which an organization can deliver what customers want.
customer service
Bill Gates words of wisdom!
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Bill Gates
Lack of information needed to understand or predict the future.
environmental uncertainty
Searching for and sorting through information about the environment.
environmental scanning
Name 5 things to consider in environmental scanning?
Who are our current competitors?
Are there few or many entry barriers to our industry?
What substitutes exist for our product or service?
Is the company too dependent on powerful suppliers?
Is the company too dependent on powerful customers?
Information that helps managers determine how to compete better.
competitive intelligence
A narrative that describes a particular set of future conditions.
scenario
Method for predicting how variables will change the future.
forecasting
Available publications such as BusinessWeek’s Business Outlook provide forecasts to businesses both large and small
The process of comparing an organization’s practices and technologies with those of other companies.
benchmarking
Name Three ways of responding to the environment.
These can be grouped into three categories: (1) adapting to the environment, (2) influencing the environment, and (3) selecting a new environment.
The process of sharing power with employees, thereby enhancing their confidence in their ability to perform their jobs and their belief that they are influential contributors to the organization.
empowerment
Creating supplies of excess resources in case of unpredictable needs.
buffering
Leveling normal fluctuations at the boundaries of the environment.
smoothing
Methods for adapting the technical core to changes in the environment.
flexible processes
Strategies that an organization acting on its own uses to change some aspect of its current environment.
independent strategies
Strategies used by two or more organizations working together to manage the external environment.
cooperative strategies
An organization’s conscious efforts to change the boundaries of its task environment.
strategic maneuvering
Entering a new market or industry with an existing expertise.
domain selection
A firm’s investment in a different product, business, or geographic area.
diversification
One or more companies combining.
merger
One firm buying another.
acquisition
A firm selling one or more businesses.
divestiture
Companies that continuously change the boundaries for their task environments by seeking new products and markets, diversifying and merging, or acquiring new enterprises.
prospectors
Companies that stay within a stable product domain as a strategic maneuver.
defenders
The set of important assumptions about the organization and its goals and practices that members of the company share.
organization culture
Decisions encountered and made before, having objectively correct answers, and solvable by using simple rules, policies, or numerical computations.
programmed decisions
New, novel, complex decisions having no proven answers.
nonprogrammed decisions
The state that exists when decision makers have accurate and comprehensive information.
I’m
certainty
The state that exists when decision makers have insufficient information.
uncertainty
The state that exists when the probability of success is less than 100 percent, and losses may occur.
risk
Opposing pressures from different sources. Two levels of conflict are psychological conflict and conflict that arises between individuals or groups.
conflict
decision makers should
(1) identify and diagnose the problem, (2) generate alternative solutions, (3) evaluate alternatives, (4) make the choice, (5) implement the decision, and (6) evaluate the decision.
Useful questions to ask and answer in this stage include 13
Is there a difference between what is actually happening and what should be happening?
How can you describe the deviation, as specifically as possible?
What is/are the cause(s) of the deviation?
What specific goals should be met?
Which of these goals are absolutely critical to the success of the decision?
Ideas that have been seen or tried before.
ready-made solutions
New, creative solutions designed specifically for the problem.
custom-made solutions
Alternative courses of action that can be implemented based on how the future unfolds.
contingency plans
A decision realizing the best possible outcome.
maximizing
Choosing an option that is acceptable, although not necessarily the best or perfect.
satisficing
Achieving the best possible balance among several goals.
optimizing
Balance in goal achievement.
It’s easy to become so focused on maximizing on one goal that you lose sight of other important goals. You’re optimizing if you make sure that no important result suffers too much, unnecessarily.
A process in which a decision maker carefully executes all stages of decision making.
vigilance
People’s belief that they can influence events, even when they have no control over what will happen.
illusion of control
A psychological bias influenced by the way in which a problem or decision alternative is phrased or presented.
framing effects
A bias weighting short-term costs and benefits more heavily than longer-term costs and benefits.
discounting the future
Trap of decisions and Pressure
You’ll feel pressure to make quick decisions, but that makes it easier to make mistakes. Fortunately, you can be vigilant while moving quickly, and you can avoid the “speed trap.”
Pit fall to group decision making?
Using a group may seem to slow down decision making. If one person dominates the discussion, it may feel like you’re speeding up the decision making. But one dominant person reduces decision quality, and most of you will have wasted your time.
A phenomenon that occurs in decision making when group members avoid disagreement as they strive for consensus.
groupthink
A condition that occurs when a decision-making group loses sight of its original goal and a new, less important goal emerges.
goal displacement
Issue-based differences in perspectives or judgments.
cognitive conflict
Emotional disagreement directed toward other people.
affective conflict
A person who has the job of criticizing ideas to ensure that their downsides are fully explored.
devil’s advocate
A structured debate comparing two conflicting courses of action.
dialectic
Where do most creative ideas come from?
Most creative ideas come not from the lone genius in the basement laboratory, but from people talking and working together.
A process in which group members generate as many ideas about a problem as they can; criticism is withheld until all ideas have been proposed
brainstorming
Are idea creators initiators?
You may be an innovator if you come up with a creative idea. But you’re not yet, until you implement it.
A less-than-perfect form of rationality in which decision makers cannot be perfectly rational because decisions are complex and complete information is unavailable.
bounded rationality
Model of organizational decision making in which major solutions arise through a series of smaller decisions.
The
incremental model
Model of organizational decision making in which groups with differing preferences use power and negotiations to influence decisions.
I’m
coalitional model
Model of organizational decision making depicting a chaotic process and seemingly random decisions.
garbage can model
Key questions for developing alternatives
Key questions here are: 21
Is our information about alternatives complete and current? If not, can we get more and better information?
Does the alternative meet our primary objectives?
What problems could we have if we implement the alternative?
