Sun Tzu, the brilliant Chinese general and premier military strategist, lived 2,

Question

Sun Tzu, the brilliant Chinese general and premier military strategist, lived 2,400 years ago. He wrote a book called The Art of War. His sayings and notes reflect a wonderful relevance to today’s strategic management of business, as well as the art of achieving a competitive advantage. The theme of the book is that “war is won not through strength but through skillful manipulation—a victory of the writing brush and brains over sword and strength” (Shlapentokh, 2006).

Another important person to study in this course is Will Rogers. Born on a western frontier ranch on the Cherokee Nation (later to become Oklahoma) in 1879, Rogers lived a colorful life until his death in 1935. He was a movie star, newspaper columnist, and author whose opinions were solicited by leaders all over the world ( Will Rogers Memorial Archives , 1994). Rogers had a healthy sense of humor and a quick wit. He was also famous for his many practical sayings about the political and economic times that were not only funny, but could also be appropriately applied to today’s business concepts of management.

For each lesson, you will be given a quote from one of these two dynamic men to reflect upon as it applies to business policy and strategy. For this lesson, examine this quote from Sun Tzu: “Thus those skilled in war subdue the enemy's army without battle....They conquer by strategy.” How would you relate this to business policy and strategy? Discuss your thoughts regarding this quote in approximately 500 words.

Once you compete all of the lessons and complete your global assignments, you should have a realistic and practical understanding of the need for planning and business policy. Write a 1,500-word paper that will tie these concepts together and explain your understanding of the major core concepts from the course as they relate to these eight quotes. You may reference each quote and paraphrase your thoughts and understanding.

Explanation / Answer

Business has become extremely competitive over the years, and companies are resorting to new initiatives to increase its profitability. New initiatives require innovative strategy planning methods, which can bolster the performance of a company. Strategy planning is one of the core competencies of any organization or business. Strategic planning gives direction to an organization to compete with its peers so that it can remain relevant in the market. It also ensures effective and efficient utilization of the resources in an organization. However, the success of any strategic initiative is tied to its successful implementation and evaluation. There are several parameters and metrics through which the efficacy of any strategic initiative can be measured in a big corporation.

Strategic planning can be defined as the broad and high level policies devised by an organization, in line with their vision and mission, so that it can successfully co-ordinate its daily activities. Planning helps to increase co-ordination among the company’s resources, ensure better control of the output through periodic review, provide identification of opportunities which can be tapped, and also improves the corporate governance of the company(Supriyanto, 2015). Strategic planning is an elaborate process, which needs to take into account various external and internal factors that have an impact on the performance of the company. There are certain criticisms of strategic planning as well, which refer to the fact that planning limits the imagination of a company. Therefore, a company becomes less innovative, which eventually leads to its extinction. It can also narrow down the vision of managers towards achieving the immediate goals, and as a result, new strategic directions are not actively pursued.

A typical example of strategic planning and competitive advantage which is leveraged by global companies can be obtained from the example of Apple.

Michael Porter has developed a useful framework for the analysis of industry and companies, which helps to understand the drivers of growth and profit for the companies, named five forces model for competitive advantage of firms(Grundy, 2006). Apple can be subjected to such analysis to understand its competitive advantage.

Bargaining Power of Supplier

            Bargaining power of suppliers is theattribute which defines the strength of the suppliers of a company and the extent by which they are inevitable for a company. Apple only designs its products and the hardware is manufactured by its suppliers. Electronics and digital media, the domain where Apple competes, is a dynamic one, and there is a constant change in capability. Therefore, Apple constantly innovates so that its suppliers can never become a necessity and wield a strong bargaining power to increase the costs for Apple.

Bargaining Power of buyers

            Bargaining power of Apple’s buyers can be considered moderate since they have the option to switch to other android products or tablets such as Kindle Fire. However, it has to be kept in mind that no other player in the industry provides quality products as Apple. The screen resolution and impeccability of Apple products lend an amazing user experience. Hence, this also helps Apple to demand premium pricing and higher margins.

Competitive Rivalry

            The competitive rivalry can be considered to be high in the electronic devices segment since there are lot of players. However, the segment in which Apple operates is premium and high end where there are hardly any operators. Moreover, Apple has always been ahead of the curve so it never had to think about competitive rivalry.

Threat of Substitution

            Apple has always tried to be innovative and entered the market when there was no other player providing similar product or service. Moreover, since it has always focused on quality for differentiation, substitution has been a small threat for Apple. However, with innovators such as Amazon things have changed, and Apple needs to prepare itself for the threat.

Threat of New Entry

            Technology and digital media have been an evolving industry wherein there are several small players who innovate and create threat for established players such as Apple. Therefore, it can be said that there is no big entry barrier for companies to enter the market of digitalization. However, matching the quality and service of Apple might be a challenge for the new players.

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