Question

Refer to the scenario below to answer the following question(s). Casey Brickly opened ​The Landing​, a convenience store on the North Shore of Witmer Lake, in 1962. With a sandwich counter on one side and a bait shop and grocery on the other, ​The Landing​ was an immediate hit with weekend lake visitors and local residents alike. In the summer, boaters parked at the piers and bought all their fishing needs, such as rods and reels, bait, snacks, and soft drinks at ​The Landing​. Even during the winter months, snowmobilers and ice fishermen were attracted to ​The Landing​ for snacks and hot coffee or hot chocolate.

As time passed, the business changed and grew tremendously. What was formerly a weekend tourist area gradually became a full-fledged residential area. Many of the houses, which were built as chalets in the 1950s and 1960s, were remodeled into residential homes. By the end of the 1970s, the days of small motorboats and 10 mile-per-hour speed limits were gone; skiing and fast speedboats became the rage. Through it all, The ​Landing​ continued to attract customers.

In the 1980s, however, Casey started to realize that the grocery area in ​The Landing​ could not compete with larger local retailers. He eventually enlarged the sandwich counter, transforming the bait shop and grocery into a restaurant with a full menu typical of any diner. "Getting rid of the bait shop was hard to do," Casey admitted. "I still had a summer crowd that relied on us for their fishing needs, but we couldn't survive a whole year on four months of profit."

In the early 2000s, the atmosphere of Witmer Lake and the neighboring lakes became upscale. "I could see that people were spending more on their speed boats than what they had originally paid for their chalets!" Casey exclaimed. Many of the chalets were inherited by children and grandchildren of the original owners. Once again, the scene started to change as many of the lake houses were used only as weekend lake homes. Unlike the previous generation, a vast number of the current owners could afford to live closer to their jobs while maintaining lake homes. "At this point, business wasn't growing," Casey said. As local competition continued to increase, Casey converted the diner of ​The Landing​ into a bar with a lounge area. "The change might have been too drastic," Casey said, "but it was the only way we could maintain a strong, year-round business in spite of the population shifts and competitive forces."

Questions:

1. Which theory of organizational adaptation is applied in the case of ​The Landing​? Discuss.

2. Which Mintzberg’s mode of strategic decision making is adopted in the case of ​The Landing​? Elaborate.

3. Using STEEP analysis, what could be the outcomes of the Societal Environment scanning of ​The Landing?​ Discuss.

4. Using Porter’s Approach, analyze the task environment (industry analysis) of ​The Landing​.

Answer 1

Evolutionary theories (Change because of competition) are discussed here.

This story describes evolution as the collection of changes accrued in institutions, societies, industry, or culture in general, systemic types. Analogous to evolutionary biology, the transition comes through processes of selection and preservation of variants. Simply arise at random in the first variants. Owing to the ability for finite resources, the selection is made by the community choosing the best-fit entities. Eventually, preservation enables some form of performance improvements to be perpetuated or sustained, and in this phase, it becomes a "firewall" of the feedback effect.
In this tale, the transition is recurring, accumulative, and clarified in VSR (Variation-Selection-Retention) mechanisms by probabilistic distribution.
Within the field of evolutionary theory, it operates on many currents. We stress the distinction between Darwinism proponents, maintaining that traits are transmitted by intergenerational mechanisms, and Lamarckian adherents, seeing traits as characteristics gained by observation and emulation in a generation (Weck, Burgelman). For a corporate setting the last strategy, a priori, is more fitting than pure Darwinism.

This philosophy describes the transition from a multi-entity perspective and there are scientific trends with a high degree of determinism in terms of the level of determinism/voluntarism, such as population biology, and some more deterministic aspects known as "Evolutionary Theory."

Adaptive mode is described here: Often referred to as "muddling along," this method of decision-making is marked not by a constructive quest for future opportunities but by reactive approaches to current problems. There is much negotiating to go on about target goals. A strategy is decentralized and is established incrementally to push the company forward. This style is common in most colleges, many major hospitals, and a vast majority of government departments. The same is case here with Landing. It is trying to survive the existing conditions rather than searching for new opportunities.

Social factors include beliefs, behaviors, habits, market patterns, demographic impact, distribution of wealth, employment, growth of the population, welfare. Society things include families, acquaintances, employers, neighbors and the media. In the case of landing, the changing demographic and distribution of wealth made them to take such decisions.

The task environment here is wholly dependent on the customers and their behavior. The changing wealth of the customers. There was mention of other competitors but nothing particular was mentioned. So, the changing demographic and wealth status of the customers is the only deciding factor here.