Explain "State sovereignty". Explain, what practical impacts it has in environmental law and give a practical example.

For your company Amazon:

(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?

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

Case Study:

Can Amazon Trim the Fat at Whole Foods?

WHEN FOUR YOUNG entrepreneurs opened a small natural-foods store in Austin, Texas, in 1980, they never imagined it would one day turn into an international supermarket chain with stores in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Some 35 years later, Whole Foods has about 450 stores, employs 85,000 people, and earned $16 billion in revenue in 2016.

Whole Foods' mission is to offer the finest natural and organic foods available, maintain the highest quality standards in the grocery industry, and remain firmly committed to sustainable agriculture. The grocery chain differentiates itself from competitors by offering top-quality foods obtained through sustainable agriculture. This business strategy implies that Whole Foods focuses on increasing the perceived value created for customers, which allows it to charge a premium price. In addition to natural and organic foods, it also offers a wide variety of prepared foods and luxury food items, such as $400 bottles of wine. The decision to sell high-ticket items incurs greater costs for the company because such products require more expensive in-store displays and more highly skilled workers, and many items are perishable and require high turnover. Moreover, sourcing natural and organic food is generally done locally, limiting any scale advantages. Taken together, these actions reduce efficiency and drive up costs. The rising cost structure erodes Whole Foods' margin.

Whole Foods Market:

Stuck in the Middle

Given its unique strategic position as an upscale grocer offering natural, organic, and luxury food items, Whole Foods enjoyed a competitive advantage during the economic boom through early 2008. But as consumers became more budget-conscious in the wake of the deep recession in 2008—2009, the company's performance deteriorated. Competitive intensity also increased markedly because basically all supermarket chains and other retailers now offer organic food. As a result, sales performance of existing Whole Foods stores ("same-store sales," an important performance metric in the grocery business) has been declining since 2013. Overall, Whole Foods Market has sustained a competitive disadvantage, underperforming not only its competitors, but also the broader market by a wide margin. Over five years, Whole Foods Market underperformed the broader stock market by some 200 percentage points!

To revitalize Whole Foods, co-founder and CEO John Mackey decided to "trim fat" on two fronts: First, the supermarket chain refocused on its mission to offer wholesome and healthy food options. In Mackey's words, Whole Foods' offerings had included "a bunch of junk," including candy. Mackey is passionate about helping U.S. consumers overcome obesity

to help reduce heart disease and diabetes. Given that, the new strategic intent at Whole Foods is to become the champion of healthy living not only by offering natural and organic food choices, but also by educating consumers with its new Healthy Eating initiative. Whole Foods Market now has "Take Action Centers" in every store to educate customers on many food related topics such as genetic engineering, organic foods, pesticides, and sustainable agriculture.

Yet, a 2015 mislabeling scandal in New York—in which city officials found that Whole Foods had mislabeled weights of several freshly packaged foods such as chicken tenders and vegetable platters, leading to overcharges of up to $15 an item—reinforced the public's image of Whole Foods as overpriced. Mackey made a video apology and said this was an unfortunate but isolated incident caused by inadvertent errors of local employees. He also emphasized that the problems were found in only nine out of 425 stores (at that time).

Second, Whole Foods is trimming fat by reducing costs. To attract more customers who buy groceries for an entire family or group, it now offers volume discounts to compete with Costco, the most successful membership chain in the United States. Whole Foods also expanded its private-label product line, which now includes thousands of products at lower prices. The company also launched a new store format, "365 by Whole Foods Market," based on its "365 Everyday Value" private label. The 365 stores focus exclusively on Whole Foods' discount private labels, primarily to address the rise of discount competitor Trader Joe's. The risk, however, is that this strategic initiative will cannibalize demand from the higher end Whole Foods Markets, rather than taking away customers from Trader Joe's. To offer its private label line and volume-discount packages, Whole Foods is beginning to rely more on low-cost suppliers and is improving its logistics system to cover larger geographic areas more efficiently.

Mackey indicated that he planned to grow threefold in the future and believes the United States can profitably support some 1,200 Whole Foods stores. Larger scale and more efficient logistics and operations should allow the company to drive down its cost structure.

Whole Foods got stuck in the middle. It was outflanked on the low end by national grocery chains such as Publix or Kroger that offer a wide variety of organic foods at lower prices. At the higher end of the market, Whole Foods Market was outperformed in urban centers by more specialized grocery stores focusing on specific segments such as seafood, meats, breads, cheese, or wines.

Amazon Acquires Whole Foods

Mackey's turnaround initiative failed. This became more apparent as activist investors honed in on Whole Foods' poor performance and highlighted the strategic shortcomings of the organic grocery chain. Even though Whole Foods Market attempted to strengthen its strategic position and also changed its board of directors, bringing in more large-chain retail experience, it was too little, too late. In 2017, Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market for close to $14 billion.

With the acquisition of Whole Foods, Amazon continues its vertical integration along the value chain into physical retail spaces. Two aspects about this acquisition are particularly noteworthy. First, the Whole Foods acquisition is 10 times larger than any other acquisition the Seattle-based technology firm has undertaken (its second-largest acquisition, Twitch, a live-video streaming site was acquired for less than $1 billion in 2014). Second, Amazon chose to make an acquisition in the grocery business and not in any other retail space. Why?

Amazon already dominates categories such as consumer electronics; therefore, it has no need to acquire a retail outlet such as Best Buy. The Whole Foods acquisition also offers Amazon a slew of new benefits: The organic grocery has a national footprint, which allows the ecommerce firm to test its latest technology on a much larger scale. For example, it has experimented with Amazon Go, a grocery concept without checkout counters. Shoppers fill their carts, and software automatically tallies the bill and deducts it from the person's account. This technology could be rolled out at Whole Foods Market. Amazon will also be in a position to gather more data about shopping behavior. Grocery shopping is a particularly important need for consumers, and Amazon reasons if shoppers start associating groceries with Amazon, they will want to buy other items online also. In addition, Amazon is notoriously cost conscious. Bringing down the cost structure of Whole Foods by applying Amazon's world-leading logistics technology could significantly strengthen the grocer's strategic position.

Finally, Amazon bought Whole Foods to compete more effectively with Walmart. The largest physical retailer in the world is the largest U.S. grocery chain, accounting for some 15 percent market share. In addition, the grocery business is Walmart's most profitable, and is the strongest draw for customers to the big-box stores. In recent years, Walmart has been more aggressively moving to combat Amazon's dominance in ecommerce. The Bentonville, Arkansas, retail chain purchased Jet.com for more than $3 billion in 2016, just one year after the site was launched. Jet. com offered lower prices than other retailers, expecting that many consumers would be willing to wait a bit longer for their shipments. The entrepreneurs were correct in making this assumption. In addition, Jet. com's strategic approach was tailor-made to enhance Walmart's online presence. Walmart.com has become a star performer as the site's user-friendliness has improved. Walmart has also been at the forefront of implementing a hybrid retail concept where consumers order goods online and pick them up in stores.

The stage is set for a battle of the retail giants, with the number-one old-line physical retailer in one corner of the ring and the ecommerce leader in the other. Stay tuned!

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1.    Why was Whole Foods successful initially? Why did it lose its competitive advantage and underperformed its competitors?

2.    Why did Whole Foods end up being "stuck in the middle"?

3.    What changes do you expect at Whole Foods following the integration with Amazon?

4.    Why did Amazon acquire Whole Foods? What are some operational and strategic reasons for this decision? Do you think the Whole Foods acquisition was a good move for Amazon? Why, or why not? Explain.

After having initially started out in 1988 as a reseller of third party software to small distribution businesses and corporate systems for retail home offices, by 1993 Datavantage grew to 16 employees and $1.5 million in sales with only $50,000 of external financing. Very few products were developed internally and, by 1993, Datavantage was slowly transforming itself into a consulting company. Despite relative success, it wasn’t exactly what Marvin envisioned to be an exciting entrepreneurial opportunity and he was ready to get out of the business. A radical change was needed in order for Marvin to consider staying and growing the company.

The opportunity for change arrived in 1994 when Datavantage acquired the services division of LDI, with Chaz joining Datavantage as part of this acquisition. LDI was a reseller of products for store systems and provided a complementary foundation for Datavantage’s further development. This dramatically changed Marvin’s perception of Datavantage’s future potential.

Also in 1994, the organization made a conscious decision to better control its own destiny and transition away from reselling third party software and into internally developing its own Point of Sale software products. After developing Store 21, a complete store management system based on full transaction Point of Sale (POS) applications software, Chaz and Marvin were considering the acquisition of XBR Track, a small loss prevention software company, based in Boston, Massachusetts.

The opportunity for XBR Track emerged out of the need of Specialty Retailers to minimize their internal losses from theft and shrinkage. Chaz and Marvin determined that retailers in the U.S. were losing an average of 2 percent of sales due to retail theft or shrinkage each year. The losses due to shrinkage directly affect the bottom line of the retailer in the form of a pure profit loss. It was estimated that retail employees account for 55 percent to 75 percent of lost revenue because of various fraudulent transactions. Transaction fraud ranges from improper cash refunds and price overrides to employee discount abuse and fraudulent credit card activity. XBR Track was offering the retail industry a solution to the $13.2 billion loses annually due to employee theft.

Chaz and Marvin find themselves in the final stages of negotiation to acquire XBR discussing many related issues regarding the acquisition and its impact on the entrepreneurial culture currently at the company. While there is no doubt about the attractiveness of the acquisition, the case brings up multiple concerns about the post-acquisition integration directly relating them to the challenge of continuing the organizational entrepreneurial culture. Specifically, the two founders are concerned with whether Datavantage will be able to successfully serve the existing customers and maintain its current level of customer support; whether XBR’s geographical location will become an issue during the integration; whether the existing sales force has enough knowledge and competency to sell XBR; and whether Datavantage will be able to effectively execute the “get into the castle” strategy intended for XBR. Above all, however, Chaz and Marvin were wondering if the potential rapid growth that XBR can provide for Datavantage can have a negative impact on the small start-up entrepreneurial culture that made the company successful.

1. What implications on the Datavantage as a growing organization will the purchase of XBR have? Is it a good fit? What are the main areas of Datavantage that can be directly affected by the XBR acquisition
2. How would you implement the integration of XBR into Datavantage’s organizational and business model structure to ensure the company’s long-term success?

the inability of differing emergency responders from various jurisdictions to communicate with each other has been a major problem. Even though the situation has improved over the last decade, problems still exist.

1. What do you think are the primary obstacles to completely solving this issue? (EXPLAIN IN DEPTH)
2. What do you think can be done to ensure that the differing responding agencies can at least communicate on a basic level during an emergency?(EXPLAIN IN DEPTH)

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)