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Chapter 7Chapter 7

Long-Term Objectives and Strategies

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Long-Term Objectives

• Strategic managers recognize that short-run profit maximization is rarely the best approach to achieving sustained corporate growth and profitability

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To achieve long-term prosperity, strategic planners commonly establish long-term objectives in seven areas:

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ProfitabilityThe ability of any firm to operate in he long run depends on acceptable levels of profit. Strategically managed firms characteristically have a profit objective, usually expressed in EPS or Return on Equity.

ProductivityFirms that can improve the input-output relationship normally increase profitability. Commonly used productivity objectives are the number of items produced or the number of services rendered per unit of input. They can also be stated in terms of desired cost reduction. For example: Objective for reducing defects, customer complaints leading to litigation, or overtime. Such objectives increase profitability if unit output is maintained

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Competitive Position

• One measure of corporate success is relative dominance in the marketplace. Objective in terms of competitive position is commonly stated by using total sales or market share as measures of their competitive position.

In FY 2001, Hero Honda was targeting a sale of 1 million motorcycles. To motivate its workforce, they raised the slogan “OM (one million) Sweet OM”.

Majestic Wine, UK’s largest specialist retailer of wine, recently slashed prices on 500 of its single-bottle wines in an attempt to win market share.

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Employee Development

• Employees value education and training, in part because they lead to increased compensation and job security.Providing such opportunities often increases productivity and decreases turnover.

• Bilt has a 4 week management trainee programme to identify and groom leaders of tomorrow.

• JM family has a drive your own development programme that sees several associates completing departmental rotations, site visits, and process improvement projects.

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Technological Leadership

• Firms must decide whether to lead or follow in the marketplace. Either approach can be successful, but each requires a different strategic posture. Therefore, many firms state an objective with regard to technological leadership.

• Caterpillar Tractor Company established its reputation and early dominance by being in the forefront of technological innovation in the manufacturer of large earthmovers.

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Public Responsibility

• Managers recognize their responsibilities to their customers and to society at large. In fact, many firms seek to exceed government requirements. They work not only to develop reputation for fairly priced products and services but also to establish themselves as responsible corporate citizens.

• Tata Group

• Eureka Forbes

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Employee Relations

• Whether or not they are bound by union contracts, firms actively seek good employee relations. In fact, proactive steps in anticipation of employee needs and expectations are characteristic of strategic managers. Strategic managers believe that productivity is linked to employee loyalty and to appreciation of mangers’ interest in employee welfare. They, therefore, set objectives to improve employee relations. Among the outgrowths of such objectives are safety programs, worker representation of management committees, and employee stock option plans.

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Qualities of Long-Term Objectives

• There are seven criteria that should be used in preparing long-term objectives:

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The Balanced Scorecard

• The balanced scorecard is a set of measures that are directly linked to the company’s strategy

– Developed by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, it directs a company to link its own long-term strategy with tangible goals and actions.

– The scorecard allows managers to evaluate the company from four perspectives: • financial performance• customer knowledge

• internal business processes• learning and growth

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The Balance Scorecard

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Generic Strategies

• A long-term or grand strategy must be based on a core idea about how the firm can best compete in the marketplace. The popular term for this core idea is generic strategy.

• 3 Generic Strategies: 1. Striving for overall low-cost leadership in the industry.

2. Striving to create and market unique products for varied customer groups through differentiation.

3. Striving to have special appeal to one or more groups of consumers or industrial buyers, focusing on their cost or differentiation concerns.

McGraw-Hill/IrwinMcGraw-Hill/IrwinStrategic Management, 10/eStrategic Management, 10/e Copyright © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.Copyright © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

McGraw-Hill/IrwinMcGraw-Hill/IrwinStrategic Management, 10/eStrategic Management, 10/e Copyright © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.Copyright © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Low-Cost Leadership

• Low-cost producers usually excel at cost reductions and efficiencies

• They maximize economies of scale, implement cost-cutting technologies, stress reductions in overhead and in administrative expenses, and use volume sales techniques to propel themselves up the earning curve

• A low-cost leader is able to use its cost advantage to charge lower prices or to enjoy higher profit margins

• It involves marketing your company as the cheapest source for a good or service. This means that you need to minimize your costs and pass the savings on to your customers.

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Low-Cost Leadership

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Differentiation

• Strategies dependent on differentiation are designed to appeal to customers with a special sensitivity for a particular product attribute

• By stressing the attribute above other product qualities, the firm attempts to build customer loyalty

• Often such loyalty translates into a firm’s ability to charge a premium price for its product

• The product attribute also can be the marketing channels through which it is delivered, its image for excellence, the features it includes, and its service network

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Differentiation

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Focus

• A focus strategy, whether anchored in a low-cost base or a differentiation base, attempts to attend to the needs of a particular market segment

• A firm pursuing a focus strategy is willing to service isolated geographic areas; to satisfy the needs of customers with special financing, inventory, or servicing problems; or to tailor the product to the somewhat unique demands of the small- to medium-sized customer

• The focusing firms profit from their willingness to serve otherwise ignored or underappreciated customer segments

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The Value Disciplines

• The Value-Discipline Model looks at 3 different areas or “value disciplines” in which an enterprise can focus. Each area results in customers valuing the enterprise in a different way. The three value-disciplines are:

• Operating Excellence;• Product Leadership; and• Customer Intimacy• Treacy-Wiersema proposed that an enterprise cannot excel in all

three disciplines because the basic enterprise culture, structures, people, facilities, processes and business models that lead to excellence in any one discipline are incompatible with achieving excellence in the others.

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The Value Disciplines

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Operational Excellence

– This strategy attempts to lead the industry in price and convenience by pursuing a focus on lean and efficient operations

– Companies pursuing operational excellence relentlessly seek ways to minimize overhead costs, to eliminate intermediate production steps, to reduce transaction and other costs, and to optimize business processes across functional and organizational boundaries.

– They focus on delivering their products or services to customers at competitive prices and with minimal inconvenience.

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Operational Excellence

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Customer Intimacy

– Customer intimacy means continually tailoring and shaping products and services to fit an increasingly refined definition of the customer

– This can be expensive, but customer-intimate companies are willing to spend now to build customer loyalty for the long term. They typically look at the customer’s lifetime value to the company, not the value of any single transaction.

– Employees in these companies will do almost anything—with little regard for initial cost—to make sure that each customer gets exactly what he or she really wants.

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Customer Intimacy

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Product Leadership

• Companies that pursue the discipline of product leadership strive to produce a continuous state of state-of-the-art products and services.

• Product Leadership is characterized by products that are the best in their market and highly valued by customers.

• Encouragement of innovation and a risk-oriented management style are key principles of a product leadership enterprise.

• It is important to maintain the level of capability to deliver products or services and the continuous improvement of those capabilities.

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Grand Strategies

• Grand strategies, often called master or business strategies, provide basic direction for strategic actions

• Indicate the time period over which long-term objectives are to be achieved

• Any one of these strategies could serve as the basis for achieving the major long-term objectives of a single firm

• Firms involved with multiple industries, businesses, product lines, or customer groups usually combine several grand strategies

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Concentrated Growth

• Concentrated growth is the strategy of the firm that directs its resources to the profitable growth of a single product, in a single market, with a single dominant technology

• Concentrated growth strategies lead to enhanced performance

• Specific conditions favor concentrated growth

• The risks and rewards vary

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Market Development

• Market development commonly ranks second only to concentration as the least costly and least risky of the 15 grand strategies

• It consists of marketing present products, often with only cosmetic modifications, to customers in related market areas by adding channels of distribution or by changing the content of advertising or promotion

• Frequently, changes in media selection, promotional appeals, and distribution are used to initiate this approach

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Product Development

• Product development involves the substantial modification of existing products or the creation of new but related products that can be marketed to current customers through established channels

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Innovation

• These companies seek to reap the initially high profits associated with customer acceptance of a new or greatly improved product

• Then, rather than face stiffening competition as the basis of profitability shifts from innovation to production or marketing competence, they search for other original or novel ideas

• The underlying rationale of the grand strategy of innovation is to create a new product life cycle and thereby make similar existing products obsolete

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Horizontal Integration

• Horizontal integration is the process of a company increasing production of goods or services at the same part of the supply chain. A company may do this via internal expansion, acquisition or merger.

• The process can lead to monopoly if a company captures the vast majority of the market for that good or service.

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Vertical Integration

• When a company expands its business into areas that are at different points on the same production path, such as when a manufacturer owns its supplier and/or distributor.

• Here, a firm’s grand strategy is to acquire firms that supply it with inputs (such as raw materials) or are customers for its outputs (such as warehouses for finished products).

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• There are three varieties: backward (upstream) vertical integration, forward (downstream) vertical integration, and balanced (both upstream and downstream) vertical integration.

• The main reason for backward integration is the desire to increase the dependability of the supply or quality of the raw materials used as production inputs

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Vertical and Horizontal Integration

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Concentric Diversification

• Concentric diversification involves the acquisition of businesses that are related to the acquiring firm in terms of technology, markets, or products

• With this grand strategy, the selected new businesses possess a high degree of compatibility with the firm’s current businesses

• The ideal concentric diversification occurs when the combined company profits increase the strengths and opportunities and decrease the weaknesses and exposure to risk

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• Coke purchased several beverage manufacturers to expand beyond the soft drink industry to the beverage industry. Coke’s acquisitions of Vitamin Water, Honest Tea, Fuze Beverage and Core Power were concentric diversification moves, providing it with brand recognition in new categories.

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Conglomerate Diversification

• Occasionally a firm, particularly a very large one, plans acquire a business because it represents the most promising investment opportunity available. This grand strategy is commonly known as conglomerate diversification.

• The principal concern of the acquiring firm is the profit pattern of the venture

• Unlike concentric diversification, conglomerate diversification gives little concern to creating product-market synergy with existing businesses

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Turnaround

The firm finds itself with declining profits• Among the reasons are economic recessions,

production inefficiencies, and innovative breakthroughs by competitors

• Strategic managers often believe the firm can survive and eventually recover if a concerted effort is made over a period of a few years to fortify its distinctive competences. This is turnaround.

• Two forms of retrenchment: – Cost reduction – Asset reduction

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Elements of Turnaround

• A turnaround situation represents absolute and relative-to-industry declining performance of a sufficient magnitude to warrant explicit turnaround actions

• The immediacy of the resulting threat to company survival is known as situation severity

• Turnaround responses among successful firms typically include two stages of strategic activities: retrenchment and the recovery response

• The primary causes of the turnaround situation have been associated with the second phase of the turnaround process, the recovery response

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Divestiture

• A divestiture strategy involves the sale of a firm or a major component of a firm

• When retrenchment fails to accomplish the desired turnaround, or when a nonintegrated business activity achieves an unusually high market value, strategic managers often decide to sell the firm

• Reasons for divestiture vary

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Liquidation

• When liquidation is the grand strategy, the firm typically is sold in parts, only occasionally as a whole—but for its tangible asset value and not as a going concern

• Planned liquidation can be worthwhile

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Bankruptcy

• Liquidation bankruptcy—agreeing to a complete distribution of firm assets to creditors, most of whom receive a small fraction of the amount they are owed

• Reorganization bankruptcy—the managers believe the firm can remain viable through reorganization

• Two notable types of bankruptcy

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Joint Ventures

• Occasionally two or more capable firms lack a necessary component for success in a particular competitive environment

• The solution is a set of joint ventures, which are commercial companies (children) created and operated for the benefit of the co-owners (parents)

• The joint venture extends the supplier-consumer relationship and has strategic advantages for both partners

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Strategic Alliances

• Strategic alliances are distinguished from joint ventures because the companies involved do not take an equity position in one another

• In some instances, strategic alliances are synonymous with licensing agreements

• Outsourcing arrangements vary

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Consortia, Keiretsus, and Chaebols

• Consortia are defined as large interlocking relationships between businesses of an industry

• In Japan such consortia are known as keiretsus, in South Korea as chaebols

• Their cooperative nature is growing in evidence as is their market success

7-53Selection of Long-Term Objectives and

Grand Strategy Sets • When strategic planners study their opportunities,

they try to determine which are most likely to result in achieving various long-range objectives

• Almost simultaneously, they try to forecast whether an available grand strategy can take advantage of preferred opportunities so the tentative objectives can be met

• In essence, then, three distinct but highly interdependent choices are being made at one time

7-54Sequence of Selection

and Strategy Objectives• The selection of long-range objectives and

grand strategies involves simultaneous, rather than sequential, decisions

• While it is true that objectives are needed to prevent the firm’s direction and progress from being determined by random forces, it is equally true that objectives can be achieved only if strategies are implemented