Question

What is Miles & Snow’s typology? Apply this concept to an Omani company of your choice?

Answer 1

Miles & Snow’s typology is an introduction to the different kinds of strategies used in a business to survive in the competitive business environment Generally most of the organizations opt for some strategies which are steady-going approach ie. the business will continue to perform its operation as it is, without any ups and downs.  The business world is continuously changing and it is up to the management to decide on what types of strategies they will have to decide to excel and to survive. There are four types of Strategies suggested by them to be followed by the management-

1.Prospector- These strategies are for the organizations, who are continuously in search of new options or opportunities for development. They are ready to face any type of uncertain conditions and to try to adapt to the changes and to search for new potentials in those scenarios also. They also are very innovative and creative in their operations.

2.Defender- These strategies are for the organizations which are not very keen to expand or grow their business in new areas and are happy doing business in their comfort known area. They only want to excel in their domain area and would not like innovation to excel. They are never adaptive to innovative techniques.

3. Analyzers- In this type, the organization used a combination of two types of strategies. One type of strategy is on maintaining the business in a constant regular pattern and the other way is to innovate new ways for growth. The idea is to maintain the old business and apart from that search for new opportunities.

4.Reactors - These strategies are used by organizations where changes in the business environment are quite often and the organizations are not ina position to react with those changes. For this reason, these organizations do not have a stable strategy.

If I were to apply this to an Omani company of my choice, I would like to apply these strategies to Sweets of Oman. It was started in the year 1990, as a very small manufacturer of confectionaries. It adapted the Prospector strategy and slowly grown into an award-winning organization. It started looking for alternatives and slowly started exporting into neighboring nations. But now it is exporting in more than 40 countries across the world. By venturing new opportunities, it has excelled to a renowned name globally.