The blog has definitely been an interesting and unique assignment for this class. I don't think there have been any other classes that required anything of the sort in my whole school career. I really enjoyed it in the very beginning when I had more time and when I had to write about challenging topics to examine myself and come up with plans. Those were extremely useful exercise that I am sure to benefit in the future. In general, this is my first real blog with weekly posts that I've been posting on consistently. It is nice to see my collective work in the end of the semester and I think I'll start my own blog after the semester is done.
In terms of the topics, I do feel like they were forced - blogs are usually more freestyle expressing my ideas first off. But I do understand that if we were to go about writing whatever we felt like the blog will not be educational in the least.
The blog surely offered an opportunity to communicate with others and understand other students much better. Judging people's inner thoughts, writing style and dedication to the assignment pointed out some interesting students in class that otherwise I might not have communicated with.
In terms of improving the assignment I feel like it might be worth to increase the amount of professor's posts and encourage students to blog on the same topic that professor has posted in addition to comments. Maybe a forum or some kind of group page might be useful to really facilitate group discussion. Comments are good but at times they are forgotten. Forums with their dynamic nature let you develop conversation and track all of the answers/questions. Plus, students will be more compelled to defend their points when they are challenged in front of the whole class.
Well that's about it for this blog unless I get some interesting management ideas and come back to the assignment. I'll post the next blog's name in the next post.
Cheers! It was a pleasure having you
Monday, December 10, 2007
Monday, December 3, 2007
Signs of strategic problems
When company suffers from strategic problems you will most likely be able to see the "lesions" showing up here and there. Poor customer service, inefficiency of operations, legal or employee problems are great examples of the outcome of poor managerial team and lack of strategical planning. I'd like to discuss too poor service/product quality and low R&D investment as indicators of strategic problems.
When company has too many customer complaints that is a direct indicator of either or both of the two: company disregarding customer feedback and poor level of quality and service. Either of these damages the image of the company and creates negative publicity and brand deterioration. No matter how much money you will spend on marketing the public will eventually catch up with realistic view of the company and will not use the product or switch to a competitor.
Low R&D investment compared to other companies is also a big problem. In order to be competitive and stay at the top companies have to maintain their edge. Therefore, they have to invest money into developing the product/services and better ways to produce them. Lower R&D investments would mean that a company becomes a laggard and will leap behind and it is only the matter of time that it will go into crisis or go out of business.
The company with a lot of customer complaints that serves a good example of poor strategic vision is infamous PayPal - an ebay payment processing company. Within the past 5 years the company has not been doing well in terms of customer service: dealing with technical issues and customer service inquiries. I personally know people whose funds have been frozen for over 2 years as a result of a technical mistake on PayPal's part and they have never refunded the money. You can find muliple complaints from general public on www.paypalsucks.com. As a result of this poor strategic practices there is lack of trust towards Paypal brand both from merchants and customers alike. Even though Paypal is trying to solve the problem by improving their system and customer service the stigma of distrust and low quality will stick with the company for years to come.
When company has too many customer complaints that is a direct indicator of either or both of the two: company disregarding customer feedback and poor level of quality and service. Either of these damages the image of the company and creates negative publicity and brand deterioration. No matter how much money you will spend on marketing the public will eventually catch up with realistic view of the company and will not use the product or switch to a competitor.
Low R&D investment compared to other companies is also a big problem. In order to be competitive and stay at the top companies have to maintain their edge. Therefore, they have to invest money into developing the product/services and better ways to produce them. Lower R&D investments would mean that a company becomes a laggard and will leap behind and it is only the matter of time that it will go into crisis or go out of business.
The company with a lot of customer complaints that serves a good example of poor strategic vision is infamous PayPal - an ebay payment processing company. Within the past 5 years the company has not been doing well in terms of customer service: dealing with technical issues and customer service inquiries. I personally know people whose funds have been frozen for over 2 years as a result of a technical mistake on PayPal's part and they have never refunded the money. You can find muliple complaints from general public on www.paypalsucks.com. As a result of this poor strategic practices there is lack of trust towards Paypal brand both from merchants and customers alike. Even though Paypal is trying to solve the problem by improving their system and customer service the stigma of distrust and low quality will stick with the company for years to come.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)