In contemporary society, television wields considerable influence over individuals, especially regarding the duration of time devoted to watching it. Among young ones, the mean weekly TV consumption amounts to twenty-eight hours. It is widely believed that excessive television viewing has adverse effects on our cognitive faculties, promoting indolence, desensitization towards violence, and hampering creative and critical thinking skills. Furthermore, it is presumed to diminish attention span and memory capacity. Consequently, society widely acknowledges the harmful consequences stemming from this preoccupation with television.
Television distorts our view of the world, promoting a skewed societal model that suggests happiness comes from consumption through advertisements. It also portrays life’s challenges as easily solvable within one-hour TV dramas, creating unrealistic expectations. Additionally, television presents crime as prevalent and injustices as intriguing while simplifying character portrayals into binary opposites like good or bad, nice or promiscuous, intelligent or unintelligent.
This oversimplification can lead individuals to seek escape and happiness through drugs if reality proves more complex than what is depicted on screen. The influence of television in viewers’ lives is comparable to that of drugs; it behaves as a dominant force. For young children, it fosters antisocial behaviors by encouraging passive engagement with the screen and discouraging conversations with both the child and their parents during programming.
Furthermore, the act of watching television prevents people from engaging in other activities such as work, play, reading, socializing, and developing important interpersonal skills like making friends and compromising. According to Marie Winn’s book “The Plug-In Drug,” the television screen’s main threat does not solely stem from the behaviors it generates, but there is indeed some danger present.
Ceres Gardening Company Case Study
Company, backed by its innovative GetCeres program, has been capitalizing on a previously untouched segment of the organics market. In capturing a key demographic of consumers, those causal gardeners who demand instant gratification, rather than the extended gardening period, Ceres is eager to expand quickly to capitalize on this opportunity before its competitors. This strategy is putting extensive strain on the company’s resources and its relationship with suppliers.
The exciting growth in sales have eclipsed the company’s sustainable growth rate and Ceres is hampered by cash deficits. Our team has identified three options for Ceres as it looks to move forward. Option A is to reduce growth to its desired sustainable growth rate by changing some key policies of the GetCeres program, primarily price, credit terms, and discount rate. Option B pursues the agenda of the CEO, who hopes to implement a plan of rapid growth by expanding Ceres’ retailing network.
This option includes a 35% increase in sales and our pro-forma statements have identified a need for $2 million in additional financing, to be obtained by issuing new stock, cutting dividends, and further increasing leverage. Option C suggests merging with a cash-cow company, such as a nation-wide retailer.
The synergies created will solve the distribution problems and increase market share. Our team suggests that Ceres should follow Option C and merge with a cash-cow company. This plan would follow a dual purpose: enable Ceres to make the most out of the industry trends and grow without risking bankruptcy. More importantly it will capitalize on Ceres’ core competency and competitive advantage: quality products.
The Ceres Gardening Company has experienced impressive growth and increasing revenues in recent years. Moreover, Ceres is competitively positioned in an expanding industry. The company has high goals for the years ahead, however, the CEO is concerned over the implications of pursuing an aggressive growth strategy on the company’s costs and financing needs.
The synergies created will enable Ceres to pursue its currently planned strategy of rapid retail growth through aggressive marketing efforts and position itself as leader in the industry. Decrease in COGS: 15% decrease from past dealer discount part of GetCeres, reducing labor and marketing costs. Reducing accounts receivables to maximum 30 days and reducing inventory. .
It will enable the company to make the most out of the increasing trends in industry and position itself as the leader. Marketing efforts and labor costs are shared with the other company and Ceres can negotiate a deal to operate under the Ceres brand and to maintain control over certain core aspects of its business: quality, innovation, relationship with suppliers. Our team is confident that this policy is the only one that can simultaneously enable Ceres to take advantage of the increasing industry trends and in the same time, grow without the risk of bankruptcy.
Creating Corporate Advantage
How can you tell if your company is really more than the sum of its parts? To create viable corporate strategy you can? t act independently within the different internal factors of the company company. Even if you work well at the company core competencies, or even if you do a great job restructuring its corporate portfolios or building learning organizations you might not succeed. In that case you would be only focusing on individual elements of corporate strategy: resources, businesses, or organization rather than turning those elements into an integrated whole.
That insight is the essence of corporate advantage – the way a company creates value through the configuration and coordination of its multibusiness activities. Ultimately, it is what differentiates truly great corporate strategies from the merely adequate. Great corporate strategies come in first instance from strength in each side of the triangle: high-quality rather than pedestrian resources, strong market positions in attractive industries and an efficient administrative organization.
But true corporate advantage requires a tight fit at each angle as well. When company’s resources are critical to the success of its businesses, the result is competitive advantage. When the organization is configured to leverage those resources into the businesses, synergy can be captured and coordination achieved. Finally, fit between a company’s measurement and reward systems and its businesses produces strategic control. There are many managers that think they are getting the alignment of their corporate strategies right, when in fact they are not.
They mistakenly enter businesses based on similarity in products rather than similarities of the resources that contribute to competitive advantage in each business. Moreover, instead of tailoring organizational structures and systems to the needs of a particular strategy, they create plain vanilla corporate offices and infrastructures as if there were on best practice that every company should follow. Newell Newells strats by identifying what itself really does well: manufacturing and distributing volume merchandise lines to the volume merchandisers.
The relatedness across its businesses comes not from similarities in the product themselves but from the common resources they draw on: Newell`s relationships with discount retailers, its efficient high-volume manufacturing, and its superior service, including national coverage, on time delivery, and program merchandising. Newell deliberately moves managers across business units and from the business to the corporate level. It enables to transfer experience and the benefits of its transfers can be fully realized because of the commonalities across its businesses.
They only activity shared is its advanced data-management system that is completely central and common to the whole Newell’s strategy. Determine the measures and rewards play an important role because when conducting an appropriate control system the corporate center can have the right perception to determine strategic decisions and influence performance in the individual businesses. 1. Corporate strategy is guided by a vision of how a firm, as a whole, will create value. 2.
Corporate Strategy is a system of interdependent parts and it depends essencially on how the different elements reinforce each others. 3. Corporate Strategy must invests and capitalize on opportunities outside the company 4. The benefits of corporate membership must be greater than the costs. Sharp Sharp is characterized by being a corporation with a consistent vision of technological creativity which has pushed it to the forefront of its industry. Sharp’s valuable resources are a set of specialized optoelectronics technologies that contributes to the competitive advantage of the company? core businesses. They have the amazing capability to multiply themselves across multiple products creating competitive advantage in those businesses based on its core technologies. Sharp’s basic structure is based on the fact that the research and manufacturing components occur in a single unit where scale economies can be exploited but which requires a need and a consequent coordination of the shared activities. Sharp invests such a time-intensive coordination to minimize the inevitable conflicts that arise when units share important activities.
Tyco What distinguish Tyco are its financial controls, goods incentive programs, strong manufacturing, and operating managers who are highly motivated by incentives and its autonomy such as the capability that the corporation have to operate in a wide range of businesses. Tyco uses the general resources of the corporation to encourage the division’s presidents to act like entrepreneurs within their groups, and to focus on expanding the scope and profitability of those units. No one right strategy – Many ways to suceed As brilliant as any strategy can be it doesn’t mean that it will fit nd work well for all companies. Every company starts at a different point, operates in a different context and has fundamentally different kinds of resources. There is no best prescription for all multibusiness corporations instead of these is the logic of internally firms consistence tailored to its resources and opportunities. We saw examples from tree different companies that followed different strategies based in different resources, capabilities and contingencies and they all have been performing notably well.