Marketing Strategy 

A functional strategy that deals with pricing, selling, and distributing a product.

Market Development

A marketing functional strategy in which a company or business unit captures a larger share of an existing market or current products through market penetration or develops new markets for current products.

Product Development

A marketing strategy in which a company or unit develops new products for existing markets or develops new products for new markets.

Financial Strategy

A functional strategy to make the best use of corporate monetary assets.

Leveraged Buyout

An acquisition in which a company is acquired in a transaction financed largely by debt - usually obtained from a third party, such as an insurance company or an investment banker.

R&D Strategy

A functional strategy to make the best use of corporate monetary assets.

Operations Strategy

A functional strategy that determines how and where a product or service is to be manufactured, the level of vertical integration in the production process, and the deployment of physical resources.

Purchasing Strategy

Logistics Strategy

A functional strategy that deals with the flow of products into and out of the manufacturing process.

HRM Strategy (Human Resources Management Strategy)

A functional strategy that uses information systems technology to provide competitive advantage.

Information Technology Strategy

A functional strategy that uses information systems technology to provide competitive advantage.

Outsourcing

A process in which resources are purchased from others through long-term contracts instead of being made within the company.

Off Shoring

The outsourcing of an activity or function to a provider in another country.

Strategies to Avoid

Follow the Leader

Hit Another Home Run

Arms Race

Do Everything 

Losing Hand

Follow the Leader

Imitating a leading competitor's strategy might seem to be a good idea, but it ignores a firm's particular strentghs and wekanesses and the possibility that the leader may be wrong.

Hit Another Home Run

If a company is successful because it pioneered an extremely successful product, it tends to search for another super product that will ensure growth and prosperity.

Arms Race

Entering into a spirited battle with another firm fro increased market share might increases sales revenue but that increase will probably be more than onset by increase in advertising, promotion, R&D, and manufacturing costs.

Do Everything

When faced with several interesting opportunities, management might tend to leap at all of them.

Losing Hand

A corporation might have invested so much in a particular strategy that top management is unwilling to accept its failure.

Program

A statement of the activities or steps needed to accomplish a single-use plan I strategy implementation.

Budget

A statement of a corporation's program in terms of money required.

Procedures

A list of sequential steps that describe in detail how a particular task or job is to be done.

Synergy

A concept that states that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; that two units will achieve more together than they could separately.

6 Forms of Synergy

Shared Know How

Coordinated Strategies

Shared Tangible Resources

Economies of Scale or Scope

Pooled Negotiating Power

New Business Creation

Shared Know How

Combined units often benefit from sharing knowledge or skills, a leveraging of core competencies.

Coordinated Strategies

Aligning the business strategies of two or more business units may provide a corporation significant advantage by deducing the inter-unit competition and developing a coordinated response to common competitors (horizontal strategy).

Shared Tangible Resources

Combined units can sometimes save money by sharing resources, such as common manufacturing facility or R&D lab.

Economies of Scale or Scope

Coordinating the flow of products or services of one unit with that of another unit can reduce inventory, increasing capacity utilization, and improve market access.

Pooled Negotiating Power

Combined units can combine their purchasing to gain bargaining power over common suppliers to reduce costs and improve quality.

New Business Creation

Exchanging knowledge and skills can facilitate new products or services by extracting discrete activities to various units and combining them in a new unit or by establishing joint ventures among internal units.

Simple Structure

A structure for new entrepreneurial firm in which the employees tend to be generalists and jack-of-all-trades.

Functional Structure

An organizational structure in which employees tend to be specialists in the business functions important to that industry, such as manufacturing, sales, or finance.

Divisional Structure 

An organizational structure in which employees tend to be functional specialists organized according to product/market distinctions.

Matrix Structure

A structure in which functional and product forms are combined simultaneously at the same level of the organization.

Network Structure

An organization (virtual organization) that outsources most of its business functions.

Virtual Organization

An organizational structure that is composed of a series of project groups or collaborations linked by changing nonhierarchical, cobweb-like networks.

Reengineering

The radical redesign of business proceses to achieve major gains in cost, service, or time.

Six Sigma

A statistically based program developed to identify and improve a poorly performing process.

Job Design

The design of individual task in an attempt to make them more relevant to the company and more motivating to the employee.

Job Enlargement

Combining tasks to give a worker more of the same type of duties to perform.

Job Rotation

Moving workers through several jobs to increase variety

Job Enrichment

Altering jobs by giving the worker more autonomy and control over activities.

Executive Succession

The process of grooming and replacing key top managerment.

Downsizing

Planned elimination of positions or jobs

Integration

A process that involves a relatively balanced give and take of cultural and managerial practives between merger partners, with no strong impositions of cultural change on either company.

Assimilation

A strategy that involves the domination of one corporate culture over another.

Separation

A method of managing the culture of an acquired firm in which the two companies are structurally divided, without cultural exchange.

Deculturation

The disintegration of one company's culture resulting from unwanted and extreme pressure from another to impose its culture and practices.

MBO (Management By Objective)

An organization wide appraoch ensuring purposeful action toward mutually agreed upon objectives.

TQM (Total Quality Management)

An operational philosophy that is committed to customer satisfaction and continuous improvement.