Apply a corporate strategy to your current or future career.

Business Operations Management

Derrick Underwood

Waldorf University

What is functional strategy?

Functional strategies refer to plans that have been adopted by various functional areas in an organization in line with business and corporate plans. Some of the functional departments within an organization that can adopt functional strategy include marketing, human resource, finance, production and even processing. For instance, the marketing department can adopt several decisions such as pricing, product advertisement and distribution, method of selling product and how to persuade consumers to buy certain products. If each department achieves their functional strategy, this contributes to the organization achieving their level objectives.

What are stability strategies in business? What are the pros and cons of these strategies?

Stability strategies are plans that are always adopted by an organization when it decides to maintain its current position but focuses only on increasing its performance and efficacy by merely changing one or more of its business operations. In most cases, this strategy is adopted by an organization when they are at risk and the adoption of stability strategies could save it.

Stability strategy has several benefits that include being less risky. The failure of stability strategy can only affect the specific department instead of affecting the operations of the whole organization. Adoption of this strategy is also beneficial in that the company does not have to disrupt their routine operations. The success of a given stability strategy may also motivate the managers of a given firm to implement more strategies in other departments.( Patla, 2003)

Despite the benefits of stability strategy, there also exist some challenges related to stability strategy which may include unfamiliarity employees of the specific department which may affect its normal implementation. Stability strategy in some cases can also affect the normal operations of a given firm since several departments are always interdependent.

What are competitive and cooperative strategies?

Competitive strategies are long term plans that are adopted by specific companies with the main intention of gaining competitive advantages over other companies that produce similar product or just competitive in nature while strategies are plans which firms formulate and achieve through forming alliances partnership with other companies. This is undertaken so that each firm in such partnerships benefits from one another.

What are tradeoffs (pros and cons) between an internal and external growth strategy. Which approach is best as international strategy? Why? What about retrenchment

Growth strategies are always implemented to expand company activities and can either be accomplished internally or externally. Internal growth strategy has the main intention of achieving growth in sales, profits and assets or a combination of both. This strategy is beneficial in that it can easily trigger the increase in a company’s internal or global operations though it requires a lot of management. (Snow & Hambrick, 1980)

External growth on the other hand is also designed to execute the same purpose and internal growth. However it majorly focuses on gaining international recognition, market shares and strengths to acquire competitive strategies. This strategy is critical in realizing maximum growth in a recommendable pace especially when internal growth strategies are limited.

The best strategy for international growth is external growth strategies. This is because an organization can make external strategic alliance such as international partnership and joint ventures that can really make it known internationally. The best approach to retrenchment is adoption of internal strategies that are formulated internally within the company in reducing costs and responding economic difficulty. (Snow & Hambrick, 1980)

References

Snow, C. C., & Hambrick, D. C. (1980). Measuring organizational strategies: Some theoretical and methodological problems. Academy of Management Review, 5(4), 527-538.

Patla, A. E. (2003). Strategies for dynamic stability during adaptive human locomotion. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, 22(2), 48-52.