Question #3 – How does vertical integration and diversification impact a company’s organizational structure and activity?

Meaning of the Question – This is a strategic management question that deals with a broad-based and long-term view on the use of vertical integration and diversification that would determine how the organization is structured to achieve its goals and objectives. The reader must see that an understanding of vertical integration, diversification, and the impacted organizational structure options are presented. Again, there are many concepts and terms to support your response.

Q5 What would motivate a company to pursue a global strategy and what is necessary to achieve a successful program?

Meaning of the Question – This is a strategic management question that requires your understanding of what global strategy is, why the strategy is desirable, and what is required organizationally to be successful. This brings in many concepts and terms, such as AFI, external and internal analysis, vision, goals and objectives, strategic management, business strategy, organizational structure, and many more.

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Etsy is more than a marketplace: it’s a community of artists, creators, collectors, thinkers and doers. This e-commerce Web site focuses on handmade or vintage items as well as art and craft supplies, including art, photography, clothing, jewelry, edibles, bath & beauty products, quilts, knick-knacks, and toys. The site follows in the tradition of open craft fairs, giving sellers personal storefronts where they list their goods for a fee of $0.20 plus a sales commission of 3.5% for each item. Etsy has been described as “a crafty cross betweenAmazon and eBay,” “your grandma’s basement,” and as “one of the largest, most chaotic flea markets the world has ever known.”Etsy says its mission is to empower people to change the way the global economy works, to bring heart to commerce, and make the world more fair, more sustainable, and more fun.Etsy is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, and also has offices in Hudson, New York, San Francisco, California, as well as international offices in Berlin, Dublin, London, Melbourne, Paris, and Toronto. The Hudson, New York location is an old cannonball factory housing Etsy’s call center and Web site design facilities.Etsy’s head office in Brooklyn houses the company’s technology, customer support, public relations, business, and communications teams as well as “Etsy Labs,” where employees can experiment with handmade projects themselves. It also features a Monday craft night where Etsy Labs is open to the public.In 2016, Etsy has over 800 employees and 24 million active buyers. About 1.6 million active shops sell on Etsy, and in 2015, these sellers moved $2.39 billion worth of merchandise. Etsy offers multiple options for paying for items, including credit card, money order, and PayPal.Very few of these sellers make a living solely through Etsy, but according to Etsy’s 2014 Seller Survey, 76% of sellers in the US consider their Etsy store to be a business, and a third of respondents said they were focusing on their Etsy store as their primary job.Etsy requires that all new products listed on the site be made by the people selling them—the use of mass production is prohibited. Etsy has made it possible for a lot of small businesses to get off the ground. According to Etsy, about 30% of Etsy entrepreneurs sell creative goods as their sole occupation, while around 45% use their earnings to cover household expense.Meanwhile, the site has been adding features at a furious pace. For instance, Etsy now provides social networking functions similar to those of Facebook that allow users to make friends with other Etsy members and keep track of their friends’ favorite shops and purchases. There’s also a gift service, which looks at the Facebook profiles of your friends and suggests items they might like, and something called Taste Test, which asks you to rate a smattering of random items and then suggests things to buy. You are invited, of course, to share the recommendations with your friends on Facebook and Twitter and with other Etsy members.Etsy’s founder and former CEO Rob Kalin hopes that these moves will make it easier for buyers to discover new products, but he also sees the new emphasis on social networking as part of a deepening of Etsy’s mission that goes beyond buying and selling. Etsy is also committed to its core values of craftsmanship, transparency, and responsibility. In 2016, Etsy became the first U.S. company to change its standing to a Certified B Corporation after going public in 2015. B Corporation certification requires the company to maintain a high level of social and environmental sustainability as well as transparency to the public with every aspect of their business.

1.What is Etsy’s business model and revenue model?

2.How important is “community” at Etsy? Visit Etsy’s website and describe its community-building features.

3.Visit the Help page on Etsy’s website and do a search on SEO to learn about search engine optimization. What tips does Etsy offer to sellers about this topic?

Question #4 – How are mergers and acquisitions, and strategic alliances used to achieve a company’s goals and objectives?

Meaning of the Question – Again, this is a strategic management question, and simply requires the presentation of how these various organizational actions and relationships are used to achieve their goals and objectives. This requires a presentation of what is a merger, acquisition, and a strategic alliance, since they are distinctly different in many ways. Each of these organizational processes have a number of supporting and related concepts and terms.

Q1. How does differentiation, cost leadership, and Blue Ocean strategies support a forward-looking business strategy?

Meaning of the Question – This question is straight-forward in that you are looking through the “lens” of business strategy as to how differentiation, cost leadership, and Blue Ocean strategies can be carried-out and be in alignment with the organization’s goals and objectives that are visionary and aspirational. It is important to demonstrate that you have command of what differentiation, cost leadership, and Blue Ocean strategy are and how they are utilized. The business strategy approach deals with how the organization competes and utilizing these specific strategies are ways to reach the goals and objectives of the organization.

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In 2016, Target, Macys, Sears, JCPenny, and others are closing hundreds of stores. Since 2000, consumers have been shifting away from traditional retail goods like apparel and electronics (the mainstays of retail stores), and buying more services like vacations, exercise, dining, and health care.The much bigger threat to traditional retail is coming from online retail, mostly Amazon, that has gobbled up the lion’s share of online retail (about 25% of all online retail), and has been growing at astounding rates like 15% to 20% a year since 2008. Apparel and electronics are also the largest sales items for online retailers, so the physical stores and the online giant all compete selling the same goods.Traditional retailers have spent over a billion dollars in the last decade trying to become online retailers, and meet consumers wherever they want to buy, online, or at the store. It’s called an “omnichannel” strategy: using multiple channels like physical stores and online Web and mobile apps to sell products. Many traditional large retailers such as Walmart, Macys, and Costco, have wound up in the top ten online retail rankings. But so far the omni channel strategy has not been especially successful in keeping up with Amazon’s growth.In what promises to be the online battle of the decade, the two biggest players, the heavy weights, Walmart and Amazon, are going head to head for the consumer dollar. In a broader sense, it’s the online-business model versus the physical- department-store business bmodel which was invented by Macy’s in 1870. But to be fair to the traditional retailers who have developed their online and mobile sales channel, it’s more accurate to say it’s the omni channel model versus the pure-online digital model of Amazon.Here’s how the two heavy weights shape up. Walmart’s revenues in 2015 were $485.6 billion (the largest Fortune 500 company), it had earnings of $15 billion (about a 3% margin) , and e-commerce sales of 13.7 billion (around 3% of total sales revenue). Walmart has about 5,200 stores of all kinds in the U.S. It produces around $15 billion in free cash flow a year, and has about $9 billion cash on hand. In 2016 Walmart’s market value is in the area of $230 billion.It’s sales growth in 2015 was 1.8%. Walmart employs about 2.1 million people (1.4 million in the U.S. alone), making it the largest employer in the world and the U.S. That works out to $231,000 of revenue for each employee.Amazon’s revenues in 2015 were $107 billion (the largest e-commerce company, but only 35 in the Fortune 500), it had earnings of $596 million (about a 1.8% margin), and e-commerce sales of $92 billion. Amazon has about $8 billion in cash on hand. In 2016 Amazon’s market value is about $366 billion, and its sales growth in 2015 was about 20%. Amazon employs about 222 million people. That works out to $481,000 of revenue for each employee.The retail battle of the decade shapes up as a contest between a giant traditional retailer that is growing very slowly, and has only a tiny online presence, versus the largest online retailer which is growing very rapidly, and has no physical store presence. Both companies have significant financial assets, and nearly limitless credit, to build or acquire whatever capabilities they choose. Walmart needs to develop new systems and capabilities both in-house, and through acquisitions. In 2016 Walmart bought the start up Jet.com, and small but fast-growing Amazon competitor.

1.What are the three key assets that Walmart can leverage (build on) to compete with Amazon and other online retailers?

2.What is Walmart’s e-commerce strategy?

3. Why isn’t Walmart worried about the channel conflict between its online sales and its store sales?

4.Why is Walmart in-sourcing the development of its online operation, in part by acquiring technology companies rather than outsourcing development to low-cost countries and other domestic firms?

5. Why did Walmart acquire Jet.com?

6.How does Walmart’s fulfillment operation differ from Amazon’s?

How can employees learn through interaction? Are some types of interaction best for learning in some situations but not others? Explain.

How can the work environment inhibit learning and transfer of training? Explain. In your opinion, what work environment characteristics have the largest influence on transfer of training? Justify your answer.

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Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, once proclaimed in an interview that the “age of privacy” had to come to an end. According to Zuckerberg, social norms had changed and people were no longer worried about sharing their personal information with friends, friends of friends, or even the entire Web. This view is in accordance with Facebook’s broader goal, which is, according to Zuckerberg, to make the world a more open and connected place. Many Facebook features are premised on this position. Supporters of Zuckerberg’s viewpoint believe the 21st century is an age of “information exhibitionism,” a new era of openness and transparency.Facebook has a long history of invading the personal privacy of its users. In fact, the very foundation of Facebook’s business model is to sell the personal information of its users to advertisers. In essence, Facebook is like any broadcast or cable television service that uses entertainment to attract large audiences, and then once those audiences are in place, to sell air time to advertisers in 30- to 60-second blocks. Of course, television broadcasters do not have much if any personal information on their users, and in that sense are much less of a privacy threat. Facebook, currently with almost 1.8 billion users worldwide, clearly attracts a huge audience.Although Facebook started out at Harvard and other campuses with a simple privacy policy of not giving anyone except friends access to your profile, this quickly changed as its founder Mark Zuckerberg realized the revenue-generating potential of a social networking site open to the public.

1.Do people who use Facebook have a legitimate claim to privacy when they themselves are posting information about themselves?

2. How will changing your settings on Facebook help protect your privacy?

3. How can you prevent your Timeline from being indexed by Google or other search engines?

Robin Tires, Inc. makes two types of tires, one for SUVs and the other for Hatchbacks.

The firm has the following limits—500 hours for production, 250 hours for packaging, and 150 hours for shipping.

The times required per tire type is given in the following table.

​

Assuming that the company is interested in maximizing the total profit contribution, answer the following:

a. What are the variables

b. Write all necessary constraints , solve by SOLVER

c. How many tires of each model should Robin manufacture?
d. What is the total profit contribution Robin can earn with the optimal production quantities?

What is location-based services?

What are two specific applications one that uses LBS in the restaurant/fast food industry and one that uses LBS as a retailer. What are two reasons why companies or organizations want to use LBS? What is a reason consumers should be wary of LBS?

Answer all 4 of the questions/topics:

Each response must be at least 200-300 words.

1. Communication

Describe and explain the importance of a good integrated information & communication system. What is the importance of communication between departments and what negative impact can a poor system of communication have for a hotel? Discuss 2 important forms of integrated PMS/Communication systems or examples of data information.

2. Future of Hotels

Imagine the hotel room of the future (10 years from now). What does the room look like? What technologies exist in the room? How does it improve the guest experience? What needs and expectations will the future guest have for Accommodation properties? In light of recent health issues what steps will the Accommodations Industry need to address to gain consumer confidence? What will the long term outcome of the industry be after crisis is cleared?

3. Housekeeping

Discuss the importance of the Housekeeping Department. Why is the Rooms Division the greatest asset of the owners? How will you deal with staffing due to lower occupancy? What steps will housekeeping need to take in order to protect our guests and our staff moving forward after the current health crisis?

4. Guest Service

Describe/Explain the following Service Recovery Model and provide an example from the Accommodation Industry for each section. Remember: As discussed in class we have to assess the Fault & Severity. Following this chart answer the following question: -How will you drive business to your hotel once crisis is over?

How will you attract business to your hotel once crisis is over?

The company president has noted a constant increase of reports passed on to her, many of them through the mail, and others through the company’s Intranet. Most of these reports remain unread, although the company president when traveling for business does find time to browse through some of the reports while on the airplane. It has clearly become difficult for her to keep track of all projects due to information overload. However, she does not want to abandon her personal objective of being constantly informed, and she does not want to query her vice presidents for summaries of major developments. What are the alternatives available to the company president?

How is Paypal likely to generate revenue through the acquisition of honey science? What is the basis of its profitability? Please explain its business model.