Management Overview - Essay Example

These approaches are preferred because companies have little control over external factors in their environment, including their competition, but have a great deal of control over internal factors within the firm. This is especially true with PLCs seeming to shorten over time, most notably in technology fields. With all this taken into account, it makes sense for organizations to focus internally to attempt to gain a competitive advantage, rather than being reactionary and responding to external factors consistently (Teece, 1997), which should help them not only get a competitive advantage in the first place but also sustain it over the long term.

In this paper, the writer will attempt to analyze changes that have occurred in the field of strategic management. Dell Corporation will serve as the model for this analysis, as its business model has been praised recently due to its unique approach to markets. 1.2 Dell Computers Product Lie Spans have been shortening from some time in Dell’s sector (computing), which obviously can create problems for a corporation in terms of creating a long term sustained advantage. This is because any advantage gained from innovation is unlikely to last more than one product life cycle, after which competitors will adapt or copy such innovations, meaning that without constant innovation, a company will quickly lag behind.

This also means that a company must display excellent flexibility, and be able to change their strategic focus quickly: in Dell’s case, for instance, a weakening desktop market might be inevitable, so they would need to be able to quickly capitalize on other business such as laptops or accessories. Competition in this sector changes frequently, as new firms enter, and new technologies redefine the expectations of the consumer base. While this leads many firms to jump head first into this sector, it has also led to some existing it, when they cannot compete with their competitors, cope with external dynamics, or maintain enough innovation to keep them competitive with their competitors in the long term.

Failed companies within such organizations also frequently do not possess the necessary resources to create or maintain competitive posture: thus the problem can be viewed as both resource based and externally driven. HP, for instance, could not maintain competitive advantage in the tablet market or the PC business because of competition from firms like Apple and Google (Cellan-Jones, 2011), making the company rely solely on its printer/scanner division to stay afloat. Lawson and Samson (2011) show that competitive advantage in this field depends on organizational asset positions as well as strategic flexibility and strategic decisions; there are distinctive flavors of strategic paths that seem to lead to success in this field.

This flavor touches on the way the firm is put together and operated, and has a lot to do with organizational culture including working conditions, expectation, management systems and so on. Samson and Lawson create a definition of the dynamic corporation – which will maintain competitive advantage, which includes things like cross-functional resources and management fascilities, which spans research