Explain how climate change regulations are implemented on national levels. Give an example.

For your company Uber:

(Please answer step by step) (Dont copy/paste information please)

1. What is your company's innovation process?
2. What is the life cycle for the company's industry?
3. Which type of innovation does your company use? Explain why or why not you believe this is the appropriate innovation type.
4. What is the company's growth strategy?
5. Select a foreign country where your company currently does not operate and perform a CAGE Distance framework between your home country and the selected foreign country.
6. Which global strategy does your company deploy using the integration-responsiveness framework?
7. Is your company's organizational structure mechanistic or organic? Explain why.
8. Which strategy and structure does your company utilize - simple, functional, multidivisional, or matrix?
9. What is your company's corporate governance policy?
10. What is your company's ethics policy?

What will motivate you in striving toward excellence in your first job after graduation? Please relate your reasoning by referencing the theory?

(The answer to this question must be atleast 2 pages long and must not be copy and pasted from previous answers)

Case Study:

Nike's Core Competency: The Risky Business of Creating Heroes

DURING THE LAST DECADE, Nike's annual revenues doubled and by 2018 attained some $35 billion. With its globally recognized brand, Nike is the undisputed leader in the athletic shoe and apparel industry. Number two adidas has some $22 billion in sales, while recent entrant Under Armour reports revenues of $5 billion. Nike is tremendously successful, holding close to a 60 percent market share in running shoes and nearly a 90 percent market share in basketball shoes and apparel. Yet one of its greatest strengths can also be seen as one of its greatest vulnerabilities. Before we introduce that strength, it helps to know how Nike started.

Nike Co-founders:

Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight

The Beaverton, Oregon, company has come a long way from its humble beginnings. It was founded by University of Oregon track and field coach Bill Bowerman and middle-distance runner Phil Knight in 1964 and was first called Blue Ribbon Sports. In 1971, the company changed its name to Nike (Greek mythology's goddess of victory) with the now iconic "swoosh" designed by a Portland State University student.

BOWERMAN'S ROLE. Coach Bowerman was a true innovator because he constantly sought ways to give his athletes a competitive edge. He experimented with many factors affecting running performance, from different track surfaces to rehydration drinks. Bowerman's biggest focus, however, was on providing a better running shoe for his athletes. While sitting at the breakfast table one Sunday morning and absentmindedly looking at his waffle iron, Bowerman had an epiphany. He poured hot, liquid urethane into the waffle iron—ruining it in the process but coming up with the now famous waffle-type sole that not only provided better traction but was also lighter than traditional running shoes.

ENTER KNIGHT. After completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Oregon and serving in the U.S. Army, Phil Knight entered the MBA program at Stanford. One entrepreneurship class required him to come up with a business idea. He wrote a term paper on how to disrupt the leading athletic shoemaker, adidas. The research question he came up with was, "Can

Japanese sports shoes do to German sports shoes what Japanese cameras have done to German cameras?"

At that time, adidas athletic shoes were the gold standard. They were also expensive and hard to find in the United States. After several failed attempts to interest Japanese sneaker makers, Knight struck a distribution agreement with Tiger Shoes. After his first shipment arrived in the United States, Phil Knight sent some of the running shoes to his former coach, Bill Bowerman, hoping to make a sale. To his surprise,

Bowerman replied that he was interested in becoming a business partner and contributing his innovative ideas on how to improve running shoes, including the waffle design. With an investment of $500 each and a handshake, the venture commenced.

Creating Heroes

Nike had already reached a level of success by the late 1970s. Based on a highly successful string of innovations including Nike Air, by 1979 the company had captured more than a 50 percent market share for running shoes in the United States. A year later, Nike went public. Even so, the company had yet to establish one of its most effective marketing tactics.

In 1984, Nike signed Michael Jordan—still early in his career, before he was hailed by many as the greatest basketball player of all time—with an unprecedented multimillion-dollar endorsement deal. Rather than spreading its marketing budget more widely as was common in the sports industry at that time, Nike made the unorthodox move to spend basically its entire budget for a specific sport on a single star athlete. Nike sought to sponsor future superstars that embodied an unlikely success story. Michael Jordan did not make the varsity team as a junior in high school, and yet he became the greatest basketball player ever. Nike's Air Jordan basketball shoes are all-time classics that remain popular to this day.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Nike continued to sponsor track and field stars such as Marion Jones as well as Kobe Bryant in basketball. With the help of major celebrity endorsements, Nike was also able to move on to different sports and their superstars, including golf with Tiger Woods, cycling with Lance Armstrong, soccer with Wayne Rooney, and football with Michael Vick. If some of those names trigger memories of scandals as well as athletic achievements, you see the problems that Nike risks with its endorsement program. Before going into the negatives, let's examine the powerful message behind such endorsements.

Nike is less about running shoes or sports apparel than about unlocking human potential. This is captured in Nike's mission to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world (and if you have a body, you are an athlete). ² Nike uses its heroes to tell a story whose moral is that through sheer will, tenacity, and hard work, anyone can unlock the hero within and achieve amazing things. Nike will help everyone become a hero. Just Do It! This type of mythical brand image has allowed Nike to not only enter but also often

Oscar Pistorius (left) and Lance Armstrong (right), some of Nike's past celebrity endorsements.

dominate one sport after another, from running to ice hockey. It spends more than $1 billion a year sponsoring athletes. Nike picks athletes that succeeded against the odds—cancer survivor Lance Armstrong, double amputee "blade runner" Oscar Pistorius, and other athletes hailing from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Nike astutely focuses on its core competency in athlete sponsorship and design, while it outsources noncore activities such as manufacturing and much of retailing. To create heroes, Nike has to engage in a number of activities: Find athletes that succeed against the odds; identify them before they are wellknown superstars; sign the athletes; create products that are closely linked with the athlete; promote the athletes or teams and Nike products through TV ads and social media to create the desired image; and so on. Each activity contributes to the relative value of the product and service offering in the eyes of potential customers and the firm's relative cost position vis-å-vis its rivals. Over time, Nike developed a deep expertise in creating heroes. More importantly, having consistently better expectations of the future value of resources allows Nike not only to shape the desired image of the athlete, but also to capture some of the value these athletes create.

When Heroes Fall

Although this core competency made Nike highly successful, it has not been without considerable risks. Repeatedly, Nike's "heroes" have become unmasked as cheaters, frauds, and criminals, some of whom have committed serious felonies, such as (culpable) homicide. Long-time CEO and Chairman Phil Knight long ago declared that scandals surrounding its superstar endorsement athletes are "part of the game."3 So Nike appears to be comfortable in tolerating those risks, at least in some cases.

Sometimes Nike continued to sponsor its athletes involved in various scandals; other times it terminated its lucrative endorsement contracts. Nike continued to sponsor NBA star Kobe Bryant who was cleared of alleged rape charges. After Tiger Woods was engulfed in an infidelity scandal, Nike continued to sponsor the golf superstar. In 2007, Nike ended its endorsement contract with NFL quarterback Michael Vick after a public outcry and his subsequent felony conviction of running a dog-fighting ring and engaging in animal cruelty. In 2011, after serving a prison sentence and restarting his career at the Philadelphia Eagles, Nike signed a new endorsement deal with Vick. In 2012, Nike terminated its long-term relationship with disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong. Just before Armstrong's public admission to doping in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Knight answered, "Never say never," when asked if Nike would sponsor Armstrong again in the future. In 2013, Nike removed its ads with Oscar Pistorius and the unfortunate tagline "I am the bullet in the chamber," after the South African track and field athlete was charged with homicide.

In 2014, Nike got entangled in the FIFA (the world governing body of soccer) bribery scandal. It began 20 years earlier when Nike decided to gain a stronger presence in soccer after the 1994 World Cup was held in the United States. In 1996, Nike signed a long-term sponsorship agreement with the Brazilian national team worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This was a huge win for Nike because soccer has been the basis of adidas' success, much like running and basketball has been for Nike. Moreover, Brazil won the tournament five times (more than any other nation) and is the only team to have played in every tournament, which is only held every four years.

Nike is now alleged to have paid some $30 million to a middleman, who used that money for bribing

soccer officials and politicians in Brazil. This middleman—Jose Hawilla—has admitted a number of crimes including fraud, money laundering, and extortion related to the FIFA soccer investigation by U.S. prosecutors.

Time and time again Nike's heroes have fallen from grace, and the company itself has fallen under suspicion of wrongdoing. Clearly, Nike's approach in building its core competency of creating heroes is not without risks. Too many of these public relations disasters combined with too severe shortcomings of some of Nike's most celebrated heroes could damage the company's reputation and lead to a loss of competitive advantage. As Nike veers from one public relations disaster to the next, disappointment with the brand and its promise may eventually set in, causing customers to go elsewhere.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1.     The MiniCase indicates that Nike's core competency is to create heroes. What does this mean? How did Nike build its core competency? Does it, for example, identify and leverage the potential identified in a VRIO analysis (are its competencies valuable, rare, inimitable, and organized to capture value) in a resource-based view of the firm?

2.     What would it take for Nike's approach to turn from a strength into a weakness? Did this tipping point already occur? Why or why not?

3.     What recommendations would you have for Nike? Can you identify a way to reframe the competency of creating heroes? Or a new way to think of heroes, teams, or sports that would continue to build the brand?

4.     If you are a competitor of Nike (such as adidas, Under Armour, New Balance, or Li-Ning), how could you exploit Nike's apparent vulnerability?

Provide a set of concrete recommendations.

For your company Amazon:

(Please answer step by step) (Dont copy/paste information please)

1. State company's vision, mission, and values.
2. What is your company's strategy?
3. Perform a stockholder's impact analysis for your company.
4. Prepare the PESTEL model for your company.
5. Prepare the Five Forces Model for your company's industry.
6. Prepare the SWOT analysis for your company.
7. What are your company's competitive advantages?
8. Which KPIs does your company use to measure performance?
9. What is your company's business model?
10. What is your company's business strategy?

Explain challenges/problems faced by a distribution channel and how to overcome it. please include examples too. thank you

Note: For the resource-based questions, please use the following definitions for the four categories of resources: Physical (property, plant, equipment, technology, intellectual property, etc.), Human (key people at all levels, their judgment, skills, knowledge, etc.), Organizational (culture, structure, processes, relationships, partnerships, etc.), and Financial (retained earnings, cash, access to capital markets, bonds, etc.)

Also recall that a resource is Valuable to the degree it helps a firm raise revenues or lower costs. It is Rare to the degree that it is possessed by fewer firms in the industry or sector. It is Inimitable (difficult to imitate) to the degree that costs and/time associated with acquiring the resource are high. And it is Well-organized to the degree that it is aligned and complementary to the firms other resources.

DC, which is Marvel’s long-time rival, happened on an innovation--a team of superheroes called The Justice League--which became “a surprise hit.” Marvel responded with a team of its own—the Fantastic Four. Assume that these new ensembles represented some kind of resource for both Marvel and DC and that result was increase sales and profits. Which statement of the following statements is most accurate?

Group of answer choices

This new resource was rare

This new resource was valuable

This new resource was rare but not valuable.

This new resource was difficult to imitate.

Explain Brundtland Commission’s definition of sustainable development.

Give an example of a manufacturing process and discuss how we can use the Statistical Control Charts for monitoring that process.

(Question is related to Lean six sigma)

1. Phishing:
   1. Specifically targets a given organization or group of users.
   2. Emphasizes leveraging extremely detailed, pinpoint information about the respective target.
   3. The goal is to leverage the reputation of a trusted firm to trick the victim into performing an action, or to reveal information.
   4. Seldom masquerades as a security alert from a bank, or e-commerce site.

2. Cash Conversion Cycle:
   1. In general, retailers want the Cash Conversion Cycle number to be as large as possible.
   2. A firm’s Cash Conversion Cycle does not vary from quarter to quarter.
   3. It is impossible for a firm to have a negative Cash Conversion Cycle.
   4. Amazon consistently reports a negative Cash Conversion Cycle. It frequently sells goods, and collects money from its customers before it has to pay its suppliers.

HR management

1)    To compete more effectively, your organization is considering a profit-sharing plan to increase employee effort and to encourage employees to think like owners. What are the potential advantages and disadvantages of such a plan? Would the profit-sharing plan have the same impact on all types of employees? Is the size of your organization an important consideration? Why? What alternative pay programs should be considered?

2)    Why is communication so important in the employee benefits area? What sorts of programs can a company use to communicate more effectively? What are the potential positive consequences of more effective benefits communication?

3)    What are the features of traditional and non-traditional labor relations? What are the potential advantages of the “new” nontraditional approaches to labor relations?

4)    Why have the roles and activities of the HRM function changed over the past 20 to 30 years? What has been driving this change? How effectively do you think HRM has responded?

use a project that you know of and provide a risk management plan for the project.conduct an analysis of the risk management process as evidenced by the plan.

Despite all the significant benefits that arise of the practice of marketing, it remains a human activity. Marketing has flaws which have been highly publicised in recent times. " Despite the social criticisms of marketing that Hungry Lion should be cognisant of." Your answer should include the impact of those criticisms on the operations of Hungry Lion. 25 ma

The Continent’s Progressive QSR Player

Stellenbosch-based fast food specialist Hungry Lion has found ideal footing for expansion over the coming years, owed to optimised operations and an admirable outlook

Writer: Jonathan Dyble | Project Manager: Josh Hyland

MARKETING MANAGEMENT

Adrian Basson is a self-described Afro-optimistic. “There’s no hiding from the fact that there are a lot of challenges in Africa, but retail is a promising sector when it comes to facilitating opportunities, creating employment and generally building a business that can have a widespread impact,” he says.

“When you reach a remote town with an empty plot, the local people don’t often have much. But as we’ve built new stores and helped to launch new shopping centres, we’ve been able to not only witness, but also facilitate the construction of new, thriving ecosystems. We’re proud to be a business that contributes to the success of these societies – I guess you could say we’re a capitalist business with a socialist outlook.”

Basson, now CEO, became part of the Hungry Lion story in 2001 and has seen the company come a long way over the past two decades to be the responsible, esteemed organisation it is today.

Having opened its first restaurant in South Africa in 1997, the business today proudly operates a network constituting over 200 stores across South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Angola, with over 4,000 Hungry Lion employees. Looking at the bigger picture, however, such statistics only touch the surface of what the brand is bringing to the region.

“In many ways I like to think that our product is an afterthought in what we’re looking to achieve,” explains Basson. “Yes, serving bigger portions, more chips and more smiles is key to our operations, but it’s just one part of our overriding goal – providing joy to our employees, customers and local communities through food, served with passion.”

This ethos is relatively new to the firm, becoming more of a core focus during the company’s major rebranding process that kickstarted in 2014. Having originally been part of the Shoprite Group, Africa’s largest food supermarket chain, Hungry Lion is now a totally independent company in its own right with a unique brand and character.

“In the beginning, we weren’t really building a brand,” reveals Basson. “We purely sold chicken and chips at an affordable price on a somewhat ad-hoc basis. However, we eventually found ourselves with 100-plus stores, and with the economic challenges that came around in 2008/09, we realised that stores without a brand, a story, and an experience would fail to deliver in the long term. It was a case of changing with the times and we invested a lot into the design of our stores, our product quality and consistency, together with the development of the brand itself.”

Since transitioning from being a business-centric to a customer-centric brand, Hungry Lion has reaped the rewards with the business undergoing stratospheric growth over the past few years.

Adding a modern twist

Moving in this re-energised direction, strategy changes quickly followed for Hungry Lion, evidence of which can be found in the firm’s increasing use and the implementation of revolutionary technologies.

Fast forward to today, the company now benefits from artificial intelligence, automated system checks, cloud computing and live dashboards – technologies which serve multiple purposes in the way of driving the business forward. This together with an always connected workforce, makes executing operationally so much more efficient.

“I’ve always had a connection with technology,” Basson reveals. “I used to work in the technology division of Compaq in London and also formerly as the Chief Digital Officer of Shoprite for a period. We live in an era where we can augment the people with technology to do the repetitive stuff, so that they can focus on the more human touches.”

In a space where most others in the fast food industry are franchised and owner-managed, Hungry Lion is unique in the African landscape, with almost all stores being fully-owned and managed from its Head Office. This is where automated systems and clever use of technology comes to the forefront in managing the business over vast distances and across borders.

“With technology comes data and with data comes insight,” Basson continues. “Using our systems, we’re able to see the performance of each of our stores in real time, have an overview of customer experience, and execute plans to fix problems at speed and scale. These capabilities would never have been possible if we didn’t have the right technologies in place.” With full visibility of information comes accountability, since everyone can see what needs to be done and if it was done. Transparency is a crucial merit of these technologies, a cultural trait of Hungry Lion that is accentuated in other ways.

Basson adds: “We have a network of area, country and regional managers who act as an extension of our Head office in Stellenbosch. Head office employees pay regular visits to different regions to keep a finger on the pulse of local operations. Our area and country managers, in turn, come to Head Office regularly for updates to business processes, training, and meetings. This constant exposure in both directions ensures that best practises are shared and implemented to all stores quickly.”

Prosperous career planning

Combined with both these expansive technologies and a transparent, remodelled structure, Hungry Lion recognises that its staff are key to achieving the firm’s ongoing ambitions.

To this end, the company ensures that it provides extensive benefits to its employees, bolstering its position as an employer of choice and equally its talent retention capabilities.

Such initiatives include the introduction of E-learning materials in five languages and the company’s live in-house training platform from LessonDesk, a comprehensive new employee assistance programme, access to affordable healthcare for employees and more specialised and tailored training programmes.

What’s more, Hungry Lion has a strong focus on career planning, testament to its culture of internal promotion.

“Typically speaking, joining a fast food business as the lowest level of employee, the pay isn’t fantastic and it’s not uncommon for these workers to have bigger aspirations,” explains Basson. “What we’ve realised is you can either listen to and facilitate these ambitions, or your workers will leave and look for opportunities elsewhere. We like to pursue the former, providing clear career paths for our inspirational and aspirational workers. From cashiers to controllers to junior managers to regional managers, and so on, this personal growth structure is in place at Hungry Lion.”

A core part of the company’s ethos, providing key opportunities to reward loyalty and ambition, Hungry Lion offers not just a job but an all-encompassing opportunity to build a prosperous career.

A sound, responsible outlook

Such a humble and grounded approach is not only applied internally, but equally externally through a number of corporate social responsibility initiatives.

These are built around Hungry Lion’s three-pillar CSR strategy, with the organisation contributing towards hunger alleviation, championing change in local communities and promoting skills development.

Between February and March of this year alone, for example, the company provided food for the attendees of a seminar addressing the issue of domestic violence, pupils of an underprivileged primary school during a field trip and fire fighters in the Western Cape, while also supporting a Soweto children’s home and a local police station’s cricket tournament for rural schools.

“It’s an element to our business that we take pride in,” reveals Basson. “We like to show that we care for our communities, customers and especially our employees and their families. There’s a lot of need in Africa from a poverty standpoint and being in the food business we’re able to help local communities in addressing such issues. I wouldn’t say we have a set agenda – ad hoc opportunities arise, and we react accordingly in each of the locations that we’re based, helping to give people a sense of purpose and promote skills of local communities.”

Asked about a particular such initiative that springs to mind, Basson is quick to highlight the company’s efforts in supporting the Zambian people during a cholera outbreak at the beginning of 2017.

He continues: “We immediately lowered the prices of our food, ensuring people could get nutritious, safe and affordable food, we donated money to the government that was used to help with the clean-up process. We even provided sanitation kits to our staff, helping them clean their own living environments to ensure their family’s health.”

Having developed a culture that is firmly centred around providing benefit to all people, whether it’s supporting local communities or providing unrivalled, progressive career opportunities, Hungry Lion’s outlook is unique and admirable.

Opportunity is a word that is creating an atmosphere of excitement within the company at the moment, with continued expansion firmly on the table for Hungry Lion after experiencing double digit percent organic growth over the past two years.

“We’ve set 20 new stores as a benchmark, but realistically this is a ball-park figure on the conservative side,” reveals Basson. “If we can open 50 stores then we’ll do it – if we find a good site where we can profitably trade, we will open. There aren’t any specific limitations.”

New systems and optimised procedures in place, last year’s corporate action, focus on organic growth, and consolidation allowed Hungry Lion to not only transition into independence, but equally provided the platform for the company to gear up for full throttle expansion over the coming years.

“We’re realistic at the same time,” Basson continues. “We understand that we cannot conquer the whole continent in 2019 or 2020, but the plan is to grow as fast as possible. Africa has around 1.2 billon people but in the next three decades this number will double. Further, there are 54 countries across Africa, countries that we know we’ll have a good chance of being able to expand into, whether it be through franchises, joint ventures, or other kinds of partnerships. The opportunities are immense, and I feel our business is a prime example as to why it’s a great time to be investing on the continent right now. I just hope that others will come and join us in the fun!”

The following table lists the components needed to assemble an end item, lead times (in weeks), and quantities on hand.

a. If 43 units of the end item are to be assembled, how many additional units of B are needed? (Hint: You don’t need to develop an MRP plan.)

Additional units            

1. Sustainability includes logistics design and can positively impact a business’s success.

True

False

2. Typically, Takt time is used in helping administer “Chase” scheduling techniques.

True

False

3. The name six sigma comes from the philosophy that a process should produce three standard deviations worth of output between the upper specification limit and the mean, plus three additional standard deviations worth of output between the lower specification limit and the mean, totaling six standard deviations worth of output between the upper and lower specification limits.

True

False