Discuss how your SSM company strategy guides your company in Resource Allocation.

Allocation of resources is an important factor for managers, especially when these resource allocations are being used to help implement a strategy. According to Carpenter and Sanders (2008) good managers must allocate resources in ways that align with a firm’s strategy and make tradeoffs. Additionally, most firms simply make choices of resource allocation based on what their competitors are doing. However, a successful firm will gain a competitive advantage by creating and developing unique advantages, and those unique advantage are created by independent decisions of resource allocation instead of mimicking other firms (Carpenter and Sanders, 2008). Furthermore, a firm resource allocation is further improved if a firm puts effort into improving its business processes as well (Xu, Liu, and Zhao, 2008). To apply this to our StratSim project, I believe our resource allocation went well, considering we were in first place for two weeks, and although we have slipped into 2^nd place overall, we have been steadily consistent. If I were to be able to learn from this, I would look to be a bit more liberal with our financial investments to gain a bigger net worth. Conversely, our investment in resources such as new distribution centers, technological advancement, and training has put us in significant debt, but not more than we can afford to pay off a large amount of.

Discuss the need for your Communicating with Key Stakeholders.

If a firm is going to implement a strategy and get the necessary support and resources, it is going to have to communicate to its key stakeholders (Carpenter and Sanders, 2008). The four types of communication are upward, downward, across, and outward (Carpenter and Sanders, 2008). Upward communication is geared to those middle and division managers to convince top management of the merits and feasibility of a strategy. Communicating downward is the means of communicating to people who will implement the actual strategy as to gain the trust and to not undermine the strategy and culture. Finally, communicating across and outwards is the means of communicating to ensure the cooperation from other units of the firm and other key stakeholders such as capital providers, complementors and customer (Carpenter and Sanders, 2008). Additionally, strategy communication relies on the three C’s: contacts, cultural understanding, and credibility (Carpenter and Sanders, 2008).

Contacts are fairly self-explanatory, the more a firm is able to network and develop relationships, the better it is as implementing a strategy that will rely on adoption or use of a certain product, service, or partnership. Cultural understanding is the fact that a firm needs people who understand the firm to communicate the strategy to better insight into the internal and external network dependencies. Finally, credibility is the last C as someone with little credibility is unlikely to gain the trust and respect of their peers or whoever they’re presenting the strategy to, thus the whole strategy would be undermined (Carpenter and Sanders, 2008). Harmon and Coney (1982) found that communicators who had more credibility were perceived to be more persuasive among subject opposed to the advocacy.

REFERENCES

Carpenter, M. A., & Sanders, W. G. (2008). Strategic Management. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Harmon, R. R., & Coney, K. A. (1982). The persuasive effects of source credibility in buy and lease situations. Journal of Marketing research, 255-260.

Xu, J., Liu, C., & Zhao, X. (2008, September). Resource allocation vs. business process improvement: How they impact on each other. In International Conference on Business Process Management (pp. 228-243). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

 

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