How do you intend to use this information?

Strategies for Competitive Advantage – Week 1 Weekly Summary

Week one provided a predictable foundation for a course titled Strategies for Competitive Advantage.  Discussions on strategy are particularly interesting to me because I used to work in a place completely focused on strategic operations, and now I work someplace that emphasizes tactical decisions.  The instructor made the somewhat annoying requirement that each student post in their summary three things they had learned and how they intended to use that information.  I hate that.  It smacks of saying “I won’t give you your grade until you tell me how you’re going to use this information”.   Did you notice how I used you/your and you/you’re in that sentence?  Artful, eh? Ah, well.  To play along I chose for my first point to highlight the proper placement of strategic decision making at a variety of levels within an organization.  Strategic decisions should not something made at the top and handed down to be fawned over.  They should be the result of synthesizing a variety of information about the internal and external environment of an organization and hopefully fit naturally with the capabilities and desires of the company.  That is a 32 word sentence, count ‘em and weep.  I skirted the “how I intend to use this information” question by saying, “how I plan to apply this is an interesting question, I could just say I’ll discuss it with the owners of my company but that would be premature at this point.  I’m expecting this point to be built on throughout the course, so for now I intend to take this for what it is; a foundation on which to build”.  Nice.

In the area of analyzing relationships among leadership and stakeholder’s interests, I thought the discussion in the text of a possible stakeholder’s approach to social responsibility was interesting.  In a previous course a fellow student mentioned the community that a company operates in could be considered a stakeholder.  Initially I disagreed with this concept, feeling it watered down the definition of stakeholder.  Actually, I probably disagreed a bit strongly (in my head anyway, see the cocktail party post for an explanation) because in yet another previous class someone commented (paraphrasing here) that everyone is a stakeholder.  Shut up.  Just shut up.  Anyway, I digress…  After a bit more study and with the added information in the text, I think I understand better where the “community is a stakeholder” guy was coming from.  I like this textbook’s approach; it seems to take the social responsibility concept and present it as a two way street; the corporation’s responsibility to the community and the benefits a company can receive by pursuing this path.  For the obligatory “How I intend to use this information” I said I would use it in refining how I perceive the relationship between my company and the community in which we operate. Nice 2.0.

For my third point I chose to focus on the strategic management model laid out in the text.  It didn’t come up much in the discussion questions but I found it very helpful while working on the homework.  The diagram the book offered was a bit muddled, but each phase had a good descriptive paragraph that had some interesting information.  This time for the “How I intend to use this info” I went with “I’d like to see more of this type of integrated strategic planning leading to actionable processes within my company”.  Swing for the fences!  I continued, “We tend to go through several of the same steps in a quick and informal fashion, I’d like to take this information and use it as a guide while attempting to document and formalize our process”.  And now for the gentle landing, “No great wholesale changes, just incremental improvements in our process”.  Lovely.  Simply lovely.

Counting backwards from 20

Sustainable Customer Relationships – Week 6 Weekly Summary

Week expanded on the ideas around implementing customer focused strategies.  This worked well with the assignment being a problem solution paper based on the scenario, a situation that highlights the importance of ensuring a company’s products are valued by customers.  In addition, one of the strategies for implementing a customer focused business model is to leverage customer relationship management systems.  This may sound like an expensive proposition, but the ability to tune marketing efforts and drive higher customer loyalty can increase customer profitability.  The key seems to be to find the right level of expenditure for your company, and implement the system in an incremental fashion.  The more qualitative measures of being able to evaluate customer relationship management effectiveness also hinge on not only knowing who your customer is but also understand how your company is interacting with them.  The discussion questions this week were split between being focused on the scenario and a more general CRM initiative oriented question. 

The homework this week included a near tragedy.  While working on the problem solution I spilled a bottle of pop on my laptop.  I flipped it over to keep the pop from soaking in, and then proceeded to do the only thing I could- wiping the keyboard vigorously with a towel—while my research paper and notes were open on the desktop.  Thanks to frequent saves and some quick action the laptop survived and I only lost a small amount of work.  The keyboard still needs to be replaced (very sticky keys that are unusable for any serious typing) but that has already been ordered.  Needless to say I’m very happy to have that research paper done and submitted.

This wraps up week 6 and the course.  Including a two week holiday break, I’m now at the 20 weeks to go mark to complete the program. 

Benchmarking, the Successful and the Failures

Sustainable Customer Relationships – Week 5 Weekly Summary

Week five provided a transition from the previous week’s introduction to the current scenario to the big Week 6 problem solution.  As a ‘benchmarking week’, Week 5 typically provides a team exercise in comparing the scenario to some real world companies.  Some classes require this take the form of each student researching two companies and comparing them to the fictional scenario.  This class also requires each student to find two companies, but the twist is one has to have been successful, the other representing a failure.  It is often easy to find research on success stories, not so easy to find failure stories.

The discussion questions continued with the scenario in mind.  This week the focus was more on considering possible solutions to the scenario.  This triggered the usual amount of discussion on the viability of the solution each student was proposing.  It is one thing to come up with a hypothetical solution, quiet another to seriously consider both the pros and cons of actually implementing that solution.  The discussion questions also addressed how well the proposed solution fit with the overall goals laid out by the students, again based on information in the scenario.  After a couple weeks of exploring various options it would be easy to loose sight of the original end state goals, so this “re-baselining” often turns out to be a worthwhile practice.

The readings for the week introduced the four “I”s of marketing services (Intangibility, Inconsistency, Inseparability, Inventory) to complement the four “P”s that had been introduced previously (Product, Pricing, Placement, Promotion).  This seemed very appropriate; the four Ps were predominate when discussing the previous scenario (about a company selling software), the four Is seem more appropriate while discussing the current scenario (based on an airline, clearly a service industry).

Sustainable Customer Relationships Challenges the Sustainability of my Patience and Focus

Sustainable Customer Relationships – Week 4 Weekly Summary

Whether my patience and focus is sustainable enough for my remaining MBA classes is in question.  No, I’m not planning on quitting.  It will be interesting to see if there is some sort of adjustment I can make to my work to stretch what little enthusiasm I have left.  It seems I have officially passed from the phase of being concerned about getting the work done to being desensitized to the hazards of not getting it done.  Sort of like the soldier that gets desensitized to the danger around them.  Except in this case its all academic, my lack of senses isn’t going to get me shot.

I’ve tried making a few adjustments.  To avoid the repetition of the discussion questions beating me into the ground, I’ve cut back on reading them all looking for something to respond to.  Instead, I reply to a few others on the same day I submit my response, then in subsequent days move on to replying to replies others have made.  That way the dialog keeps moving and I don’t have to deal with 20 different people answering the same question the same way, a mind-numbing exercise.

The homework this week had an interesting complication.  The world count target was extremely low for the kind of information requested.  As I was heading towards the finish line Sunday evening (the paper was due Monday night) I got called away to a meeting.  I wasn’t done with the paper but, here’s the interesting bit, I didn’t care.  I was simply done for the evening.  I honestly had zero interest in putting another word on the page.  That, my friends, is a good time to walk away from the word processor.

I came back to shut down the computer several hours later and ended up throwing a few words into the introduction (the last part written, as any seasoned researcher or writer will tell you).  So the cap had been put on the paper for the day, but there was still some additions needed and those went in the next day.  To this point I had tried very hard to get all homework due on Monday completed by Sunday night.  That leaves Monday as a clean-up day, and much less stressful.  I’m planning on keeping that as the normal operating procedure, but am going to have to be more disciplined at doing parts of the weekend work during the week, something I haven’t been doing.