Business Management - Essay Example

Defined as all the man-made or man-modified physical structures that include buildings, space and products, infrastructure of communities, built environment encompasses homes, schools, roads, fixtures, parks, cities, and everything else touched he has touched (Cohen, 2005). Presently, the built environment addresses various divisions, from art and design, architecture and interior architecture, construction management, and urban and regional planning. Art and design, although minuscule and seemingly irrelevant in scale, have intermarried with architecture and urban planning never to part again as aesthetics no longer are limited to association with the age-old Renaissance.

Urban planners and engineers work closely with architects, constructors, contractors, and designers and the built industry grows into a nature-friendly aspect of human enterprise. "Competing for the Future" presents considerable forward-thinking strategies for companies as they are challenged maintaining present status which are compared to mere running in place and threatened with global competitors (Mizrach, 1997). The book invokes management and employees to work together to innovate and foresee what may be given to consumers that would amaze and satisfy.

Globalisation at that time already poked its threat to established multinational companies, when dot.com bubble was about to break, the book better-advised the senior and junior managements to have second thoughts. "instead of doing a lot of market research, we refine our thinking on a product and its use and try to create a market for it by educating and communicating with the public. our emphasis has always been to create something out of nothing," Hamel and Pralahad (1994, p.109) wrote. It suggested that senior management team must set aside a time of about 50 percent over a period of months in order to "develop a prescient and distinctive point of view about the future" and this may apply well to built industries, as earlier problems did not seem as complicated as they are right now.

"Unlearning" was a keyword so that it meant there is a close scrutiny of the past, interlinked with market share opportunities and creation of core competencies transcending business units (Hamel and Pralahad, 1994). The book also encourages coalition, which has become inevitable now as an industry alone could no hardly address a single issue facing built environment. Speed, as the book have claimed, is important "in the battle for the future" but not necessarily in the future anymore. There are considerable pressures today invokes speed as an element to answer problems within the built industry as "Whole industries become vulnerable to new rules when all the incumbents accept, more or less, the same industry conventions," (Hamel and Pralahad, 1994).

Industries were challenged not only to address genuine profit crisis but encouraged to create "quasi-crisis in advance" so that pointing out of the difference of achievement is considered by both a s pass, allowing for evolving competencies.One that hits the built industry bulls-eye is the book's claim that "A strategic architecture is the essential link between today and tomorrow, between short term and longer,' as urban planners now scamper to detail out solutions for the urban dilemma. More so, "Every company should