Topic 18

Strategy is a plan or series of plans for achieving an aim, especially relating to the best way for an organization to develop. It must be formulated in terms of resource allocation. Resources or assets can be physical, technological and human.

The job of every company is to allocate its capital in the most judicious way. They should invest in the most profitable activities or products for which they have appropriate resources, or for which they can realistically acquire or develop the resources.

A company might have the “strategy” of entering the market for becoming successful. But it’s hard because there are dominated key players. They put up barriers preventing new companies from entering it.

I want to say some words about the developing of strategy for a large company. First the management should think about the assets of the company and what’s unique about those assets, what markets they know about and what market are growing and which of those markets can make the best use of their assets. Then they consider all these things and then they develop the strategy, which consists of three simple steps:

The first one is to operate better.

The second step is to look at the assets they have and see which ones they should keep and which ones they should dispose of.

And then the third step is to stick together all their businesses, so that they are able to use each other’s assets.

The strategies of large companies are trends towards more focus on people, towards more teamwork. The strategy should be clear and define a unique goal. The example of such strategy is Coca-Cola’s. they are going to focus on their product, on international markets, and they are going to focus on distribution and promotion.

Topic 19

Merger is an occasion when two or more companies, organizations join together to form a larger company. By combining two or more companies with good management teams, you automatically build up the strength of your management and you do it quickly. You can also widen your customer base and have more distribution channels. Study after study of past merger waves has shown that two out of every three deals have not worked. Success in the future will depend more than ever on the merged companies ability to create added value. And that will depend mainly on what happens after the deal has been done. Mergers can fail on a number of levels in terms of their benefit to the shareholder, customers, employee and business partners. Here if you don’t keep the people you have done a tremendous disservice to your shareholders.

Takeover is the act of getting control of a company by buying more than half of its shares.

Alliance is an agreement between two or more organizations to work together.

Topic 20

Culture – is the ideas, beliefs, and customs that are shared and accepted by people in a society or it’s the attitudes or beliefs that are shared by a particular group of people or in a particular organization.

As the world gets smaller, we need to learn more about each other’s values, beliefs, habits and expectations. Culture is the way we do things around here. “Here” may be a country, a region, a company.

There’re can be stereotypes, it may be at one extreme, or it may just not to be true. Sometimes there are maybe more variety in people’s behaviour within a culture than between people of two different cultures. Neighbouring countries or regions, or two companies in the same industry consider themselves to be very different in comparison with each other.

Cross-cultural issues are connected with variations in behaviour across different cultures and, of course, they relate to the business world. There are some examples:

• Does religion play a role in business life?

• Is there hierarchy in companies, and what is the distance between managers and the people who work for them?

• How formal are the relations between employees, taking into account levels of formality in language and behaviour?

• What is the relation of work to private life of people? Do they invite colleagues to their houses or prefer contacts in the office? Do spouses attend certain types of company events?