Strategy Implementation, Evaluation And Control
Prepare 10- to 12-slide MS PowerPoint presentation with speaker notes based on the company selected in Week 3 Individual Assignment. The presentation should include the results of the Week 3 Environmental Scan, the Week 4 Strategy Formulation, in addition to describing the Strategy Implementation and Evaluation and Control.
company is picked is StickerGiant
Internal and External Environmental Scan (Week 3)
Long Term Goals and Objectives (Week 4)
Business Management Strategy (Week 4)
Strategy Implementation
Discuss International Strategy.
Discuss Strategic Implementation.
Explain the influence of Governance and Ethics.
Discuss the Company Social Value.
Discuss Innovation and Diversification.
Discuss Legal limitations.
Evaluation and Control
Explain Strategic Metrics.
Discuss Key Financial Ratios.
Cite at least 3 scholarly references.
Examination of StickerGiant’s Internal and External Environments
According to Patricia Buhler (2008), strategic management has become the tool that is vital for the success of all business models. She indicates that all businesses, regardless of size or profit model, need to develop a strategic management plan whose objectives are uppermost in the minds of all members of an organization from executive management to front-line personnel. And she emphasizes that the plan needs to be flexible enough to meet today’s “hypercompetitive environment and the rapidly changing business landscape (p. 19).” Thus, the strategic plan of any organization must be constantly re-examined and changed as necessary to meet these challenges. Change is a constant force that challenges a firm’s internal and external environment, Buhler states (2008). In order to survive, a firm must have strategies in place that it can implement to ensure growth and stability.
I have chosen to review a small manufacturing company known as StickerGiant’s because it makes clear Buhler’s theory of review and flexibility (2008) when examining internal and external environments. Forbes magazine stated that StickerGiant’s strategic management process made it one of the best small manufacturing companies in 2017 (Burlingham, 2017). They are a fairly new firm, only in business since 2000. By examining this small firm, one can see how their business strategy changed to meet new challenges. Thus, the question: How did they manage to do that? Part of the answer is size, it seems. Larger operations are typically so top heavy with various levels of personnel that it is hard to measure the trickledown effect of changes because it is often hard to get the changes to trickledown.
Eighteen years ago, John Fischer, founder and CEO of sticker Giant, began his business creating only political stickers—for example, those bumper stickers seen on cars announcing support for a specific candidate. He and his wife initially ran the business from the basement of their home in Longmont, Colorado. They are now up to 40 employees with an annual revenue of $10.2 million (Fischer, 2017). He states that sticker Giant has transformed itself several times over its 18-year existence, thus confirming Buhler’s theory of need for company flexibility. From political stickers, they blended into creating many stickers—a kind of “Amazon of Stickers” operation, successfully selling these from their online store. These stickers were a mix of genres: e.g., popular rock groups, TV and movie characters, political issues, memes, etc.
However, sticker Giant soon realized that many businesses were requesting customized stickers and labels to identify their own products. With this, they decided to close the online sticker store and concentrate on customization orders only, which Fischer admits was a scary time for them; after all their revenues from the online store were quite good. But their external environment appeared to be demanding the customization services, so they decided to follow this trend. Also, competition in this area is from much bigger outfits that do much more than just stickers and labels, so the idea of concentrating on a smaller niche market was appealing. And they could offer a more personalized service. Fisher says that this was not a difficult move for them because their internal environment had always been one of close contact between employees and management (2017). There was no “front office/back office” rivalry going on as may be found in much larger manufacturing firms.
Thus, they began using a reporting system known as Open Book Management that had three principal guidelines (Freitas, 2014):
· Make sure employees are taught the firm’s objectives for success
· Every employee is expected and encouraged to use their knowledge to improve performance
· Every employee must have a stake in not only the company’s success but also its risk of failure
Thus, sticker Giant shares its financial dashboard with the entire staff on a weekly basis and explains the reasons for the numbers that they see. They freely confess that installing this system was not easy and involved a lot of time. And CEO Fischer admits that they have tweaked the process over time to perfect it to suit their business needs. However, employees like the idea of being individually empowered with the ability to freely collect and report data that may improve StickerGiant’s systems, which translates into benefits for the company and co-workers (Freitas).
According to Hamzeh (2016), Open Book Management attempts to establish a common vision among employees. By providing the freedom to experiment and explore new ideas, they no longer fear error or failure. Thus, Open Book Management seems to be a method of instituting a closely-knit culture and a feeling of employee ownership in a company thus improving the internal environment. StickerGiant believes it gives employees a deeper understanding of how their company operates. With this information they understand what it takes to make a company succeed.
Interestingly, the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) did a study on how well the Open Book Management system was doing in 50+ companies that have been using it for three or more years (2018). NCEO was surprised to discover how successful Open Book was across the spectrum of companies they surveyed. Their findings indicated that use of Open Book does increase sales and company growth.
Additionally, StickerGiant advantageously uses its website to advertise its success stories to its external environment. Each of these stories involves an employee who had a direct effect on the firm’s bottom line. Their website also contains stories of how the various stickers and labels they have created for clients were also used to promote or advertise a cause and how successful the promotion outcome was. In fact, StickerGiant promotes one product line as the way to “get your brand to stick” and in an organic and environmentally safe way (Turn your logo, 2018). All of these efforts were the result of using the Open Books method to poll their employees for ideas of how to improve sales. Thus, use of Open Book methodology is working to improve both internal and external environments.
With the challenges that organizations face in the current fast-paced environment that now needs to also consider globalization, it is imperative that they be aware of both the opportunities and threats that exist to both internal and external environments. Thus, it seems that they must look more to their internal assets, their employees, for better understanding of what exists externally and how they should face that challenge.
References
Buhler, P. M. (2008). Managing in the new millennium: The use of dashboards in the strategic management process. Supervision, 69(11), 19-21. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.contentproxy.phoenix.edu/docview/195601629/fulltext/98D1F79621F94A39PQ/1?accountid=35812
Burlingham, B. (2017). Forbes small giants 2017: America’s best small companies. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/boburlingham/2017/05/09/forbes-small-giants-2017-americas-best-small-companies/#4780a0ff4c32)
Fischer, J. (2017). StickerGiant: How to build a company culture that sticks. [web video commentary]. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/boburlingham/2017/05/09/forbes-small-giants-2017-americas-best-small-companies/#4780a0ff4c32)
Freitas, J. (2014). StickerGiant’s Open Book Management structure. [Web blog]. Retrieved from https://www.stickergiant.com/blog/stickergiants-open-book-management-structure/
Hamzeh, A. (2016). The impact of Open Book Management on achieving differentiation in the business organization. International Journal of Human Resource Studies, 6(2). Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.5296/ijhrs.v6i2.9546
National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO). (2018). Open-Book Management. NCEO: Articles. Retrieved from https://www.nceo.org/articles/open-book-management
Turn your logo into a custom sticker. (2018). StickerGiant [Web ad]. Retrieved from https://www.stickergiant.com/logo-stickers
