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ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

The Arctic is undergoing an extraordinary transformation - a transformation that will have

global impact not only on wildlife, but upon many countries and a number of industries. Some
of the most significant environmental changes are retreating sea ice, melting glaciers, thawing
permafrost, increasing coastal erosion, and shifting vegetation zones. The average
temperature of the Arctic has risen at twice the rate of the rest of the planet. According to
Impacts of a Warming Arctic: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a 2004 report by the eight-
nation Arctic Council, the melting of the area’s highly reflective snow and sea ice is uncovering
darker land and ocean surfaces, further increasing the absorption of the sun’s heat. Reductions
in Arctic sea ice will drastically shrink marine habitats for polar bears, ice seals, and some
seabirds. The warming of the tundra will likely boost greenhouse gases by releasing long-
stored quantities of methane and carbon dioxide.

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ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING

 Environmental scanning is the monitoring, evaluation, and dissemination of

information from the external and internal environments to key people within the
corporation.
 Corporation uses this tool to avoid strategic surprise and to ensure its long-term
health.
 Natural environment includes physical resources, wildlife, and climate that are an
inherent part of existence on Earth - form an ecological system of interrelated life.
 The societal environment is mankind’s social system that includes general forces
that do not directly touch on the short-run activities of the organization that can,
and often do, influence its long-run decisions.

ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING

 These factors affect multiple industries and are as follows:

 Economic forces that regulate the exchange of materials, money, energy,
and information.
 Technological forces that generate problem-solving inventions.
 Political–legal forces that allocate power and provide constraining and
protecting laws and regulations.
 Sociocultural forces that regulate the values, mores, and customs of
society.

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ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING

 The task environment includes those elements or groups that directly affect
a corporation and, in turn, are affected by it - governments, local
communities, suppliers, competitors, customers, creditors, employees/labour
unions, special-interest groups, and trade associations.
 Industry analysis refers to an in-depth examination of key factors within a
corporation’s task environment.

SCANNING THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

 Large corporations categorize the societal environment in any one

geographic region into four areas and focus their scanning in each area on
trends that have corporate wide relevance.
 By including trends from the natural environment, this scanning can be
called STEEP Analysis, the scanning of Sociocultural, Technological,
Economic, Ecological, and Political-legal environmental forces.
 It may also be called PESTEL Analysis for Political, Economic, Sociocultural,
Technological, Ecological, and Legal forces.
 Obviously, trends in any one area may be very important to firms in one
industry but of lesser importance to firms in other industries.

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SCANNING THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

SCANNING THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

 Changes in the technological part of the societal environment can have a great
impact on multiple industries.
 Researchers at George Washington University have identified a number of
technological breakthroughs that are already having a significant impact on many
industries:
 Portable information devices and electronic networking
 Alternative energy sources
 Precision farming
 Virtual personal assistants
 Genetically altered organisms
 Smart, mobile robots

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SCANNING THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

 Trends in the political–legal part of the societal environment have a significant

impact not only on the level of competition within an industry but also on which
strategies might be successful.
 Demographic trends are part of the sociocultural aspect of the societal
environment.
 Eight current sociocultural trends are transforming North America and the rest of
the world:
1. Increasing environmental awareness
2. Growing health consciousness
3. Expanding seniors market
4. Impact of Generation Y Boomlet

SCANNING THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

5. Declining mass market

6. Changing pace and location of life
7. Changing household composition
8. Increasing diversity of workforce and markets
 International Societal Considerations. Each country or group of countries in which a
company operates presents a unique societal environment with a different set of economic,
technological, political–legal, and sociocultural variables for the company to face.
 International societal environments vary so widely that a corporation’s internal environment
and strategic management process must be very flexible.

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SCANNING THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

 Before planning its strategy for a particular international location, a company

must scan the particular country environment in question for opportunities
and threats, and it must compare those with its own organizational strengths
and weaknesses.
 The key is to be able to identify the trigger point when demand for a
particular product or service is ready to boom.
 How can anyone monitor and keep track of all the trends and factors in the
worldwide societal environment? With the existence of the Internet –
creating a scanning system.

SCANNING THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

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SCANNING THE TASK ENVIRONMENT

SCANNING THE TASK ENVIRONMENT

 A corporation’s scanning of the environment includes analyses of all the

relevant elements in the task environment.
 The many reports resulting from these scanning efforts, when boiled down
to their essentials, act as a detailed list of external strategic factors.

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IDENTIFYING EXTERNAL STRATEGIC FACTORS

 The origin of competitive advantage lies in the ability to identify and respond to
environmental change well in advance of competition.
 No firm can successfully monitor all external factors - choices must be made.
 Even though managers agree that strategic importance determines what variables
are consistently tracked, they sometimes miss or choose to ignore crucial new
developments.
 Personal values and functional experiences of a corporation’s managers as well as
the success of current strategies are likely to bias both their perception of what is
important to monitor in the external environment and their interpretations of what
they perceive.

IDENTIFYING EXTERNAL STRATEGIC FACTORS

 This willingness to reject unfamiliar as well as negative information is called strategic

myopia.
 If a firm needs to change its strategy, it might not be gathering the appropriate
external information to change strategies successfully.
 One way to identify and analyse developments in the external environment is to
use the issues priority matrix as follows:
1. Identify a number of likely trends emerging in the natural, societal, and task
environments. These are strategic environmental issues—those important trends that, if
they occur, determine what the industry or the world will look like in the near future.
2. Assess the probability of these trends actually occurring, from low to medium to high.
3. Attempt to ascertain the likely impact (from low to high) of each of these trends on the
corporation being examined.

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IDENTIFYING EXTERNAL STRATEGIC FACTORS

IDENTIFYING EXTERNAL STRATEGIC FACTORS

 A corporation’s external strategic factors are the key environmental trends

that are judged to have both a medium to high probability of occurrence
and a medium to high probability of impact on the corporation.
 The issues priority matrix can then be used to help managers decide which
environmental trends should be merely scanned (low priority) and which
should be monitored as strategic factors (high priority).
 Those environmental trends judged to be a corporation’s strategic factors
are then categorized as opportunities and threats and are included in
strategy formulation.

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INDUSTRY ANALYSIS: ANALYSING THE TASK ENVIRONMENT

 An industry is a group of firms that produces a similar product or service,

such as soft drinks or financial services.
 An examination of the important stakeholder groups, such as suppliers and
customers, in a particular corporation’s task environment is a part of industry
analysis.

PORTER’S APPROACH TO INDUSTRY ANALYSIS

 Michael Porter, an authority on competitive strategy, contends that a

corporation is most concerned with the intensity of competition within its
industry.
 The level of this intensity is determined by basic competitive forces.
 The collective strength of these forces, determines the ultimate profit
potential in the industry, where profit potential is measured in terms of long-
run return on invested capital.
 In carefully scanning its industry, a corporation must assess the importance
to its success of each of six forces.
 The stronger each of these forces, the more limited companies are in their
ability to raise prices and earn greater profits.

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PORTER’S APPROACH TO INDUSTRY ANALYSIS

THREAT OF NEW ENTRANTS

 New entrants to an industry typically bring  Product differentiation

to it new capacity, a desire to gain market
 Capital requirements
share, and substantial resources – threats.
 Switching costs
 The threat of entry depends on the
presence of entry barriers and the reaction  Access to distribution channels
that can be expected from existing  Cost disadvantages independent of size
competitors.
 Government policy
 An entry barrier is an obstruction that makes
it difficult for a company to enter an
industry.
 Some of the possible barriers to entry are:
 Economies of scale

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RIVALRY AMONG EXISTING FIRMS

 In most industries, corporations are  Product characteristics

mutually dependent.  Amount of fixed costs
 A competitive move by one firm can
 Capacity
be expected to have a noticeable
effect on its competitors and thus  Height of exit barriers
may cause retaliation.  Diversity of rivals
 intense rivalry is related to the
presence of several factors:
 Number of competitors
 Rate of industry growth

THREAT OF SUBSTITUTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES

 A substitute product is a product that searching for products or services

appears to be different but can that can perform the same function,
satisfy the same need as another even though they have a different
product. appearance and may not appear to
 Substitutes limit the potential returns
be easily substitutable.
of an industry by placing a ceiling on
the prices firms in the industry can
profitably charge.
 Sometimes a difficult task, the
identification of possible substitute
products or services means

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BARGAINING POWER OF BUYERS

 Buyers affect an industry through their  Changing suppliers costs very little.
ability to force down prices, bargain for
 The purchased product represents a high
higher quality or more services, and play
percentage of a buyer ’s costs, thus
competitors against each other.
providing an incentive to shop around for
 A buyer or a group of buyers is powerful if a lower price.
some of the following factors hold true:
 A buyer earns low profits and is thus very
 A buyer purchases a large proportion of sensitive to costs and service differences.
the seller’s product.
 The purchased product is unimportant to
 A buyer has the potential to integrate the final quality or price of a buyer ’s
backward by producing the product itself. products or services and thus can be
easily substituted without affecting the
 Alternative suppliers are plentiful because
final product adversely.
the product is standard or
undifferentiated.

BARGAINING POWER OF SUPPLIERS

 Suppliers can affect an industry through  Suppliers are able to integrate

their ability to raise prices or reduce the forward and compete directly with
quality of purchased goods and their present customers.
services.
 A purchasing industry buys only a
 A supplier or supplier group is small portion of the supplier group’s
powerful if some of the following goods and services and is thus
factors apply: unimportant to the supplier.
 The supplier industry is dominated by
a few companies, but it sells to many.
 Its product or service is unique
and/or it has built up switching costs.
 Substitutes are not readily available.

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RELATIVE POWER OF OTHER STAKEHOLDERS

 A sixth force should be added to Porter’s list to include a variety of stakeholder

groups from the task environment.
 Some of these groups are governments, local communities, creditors, trade
associations, special-interest groups, unions, shareholders, and complementors.
 Complementor is a company (e.g., Microsoft) or an industry whose product works
well with a firm’s (e.g., Intel’s) product and without which the product would lose
much of its value
 The importance of these stakeholders varies by industry.

INDUSTRY EVOLUTION

 Over time, most industries evolve through a series of stages from growth
through maturity to eventual decline.
 The strength of each of the six forces mentioned earlier varies according to
the stage of industry evolution.
 The industry life cycle is useful for explaining and predicting trends among
the six forces that drive industry competition.
 when an industry is new, people often buy the product, regardless of price,
because it fulfils a unique need.
 This usually occurs in a fragmented industry—where no firm has large
market share, and each firm serves only a small piece of the total market in
competition with others.

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INDUSTRY EVOLUTION

 By the time an industry enters maturity, products tend to become more like
commodities.
 This is now a consolidated industry—dominated by a few large firms, each
of which struggles to differentiate its products from those of the competition.
 As an industry moves through maturity toward possible decline, its products’
growth rate of sales slows and may even begin to decrease.
 To the extent that exit barriers are low, firms begin converting their facilities
to alternate uses or sell them to other firms.
 The industry tends to consolidate around fewer but larger competitors.

CATEGORIZING INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIES

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CATEGORIZING INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIES

 According to Porter, world industries vary on a continuum from

multidomestic to global.
 Multidomestic industries are specific to each country or group of countries.
 Global industries operate worldwide, with MNCs making only small
adjustments for country-specific circumstances.
 In a global industry an MNC’s activities in one country are significantly
affected by its activities in other countries.

CATEGORIZING INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIES

 The factors that tend to determine whether an industry will be primarily

multidomestic or primarily global are:
1. Pressure for coordination within the MNCs operating in that industry.
2. Pressure for local responsiveness on the part of individual country
markets.
 To the extent that the pressure for coordination is strong and the pressure
for local responsiveness is weak for MNCs within a particular industry, that
industry will tend to become global.

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CATEGORIZING INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIES

 In contrast, when the pressure for local responsiveness is strong and the
pressure for coordination is weak for multinational corporations in an
industry, that industry will tend to be multidomestic.
 Between these two extremes lie a number of industries with varying
characteristics of both multidomestic and global industries. These are
regional industries.
 The dynamic tension between the pressure for coordination and the
pressure for local responsiveness is contained in the phrase, “Think globally
but act locally.”

INTERNATIONAL RISK ASSESSMENT

 Some firms develop elaborate information networks and computerized

systems to evaluate and rank investment risks.
 Regardless of the source of data, a firm must develop its own method of
assessing risk.
 It must decide on its most important risk factors and then assign weights to
each.

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STRATEGIC GROUPS

 A strategic group is a set of business units or firms that “pursue similar

strategies with similar resources.
 Categorizing firms in any one industry into a set of strategic groups is very
useful as a way of better understanding the competitive environment.
 Strategic groups in a particular industry can be mapped by plotting the
market positions of industry competitors on a two-dimensional graph.

STRATEGIC GROUPS

Mapping Strategic
Groups in the U.S.
Restaurant Chain
Industry

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STRATEGIC TYPES

 A strategic type is a category of firms based on a common strategic

orientation and a combination of structure, culture, and processes consistent
with that strategy.
 These general types have the following characteristics:
 Defenders are companies with a limited product line that focus on
improving the efficiency of their existing operations.
 Prospectors are companies with fairly broad product lines that focus on
product innovation and market opportunities.
 Analysers are corporations that operate in at least two different product-
market areas, one stable and one variable.

STRATEGIC TYPES

 Reactors are corporations that lack a consistent strategy-structure-culture

relationship.
 Dividing the competition into these four categories enables the strategic
manager not only to monitor the effectiveness of certain strategic
orientations, but also to develop scenarios of future industry developments.

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HYPERCOMPETITION

 Most industries today are facing an ever-increasing level of

environmental uncertainty.
 They are becoming more complex and more dynamic.
 In hypercompetitive industries, competitive advantage comes from an
up-to-date knowledge of environmental trends and competitive
activity coupled with a willingness to risk a current advantage for a
possible new advantage.
 Companies must be willing to cannibalize their own products in order
to sustain their competitive advantage.

USING KEY SUCCESS FACTORS TO CREATE AN INDUSTRY MATRIX

 Key success factors are variables that can significantly affect the overall
competitive positions of companies within any particular industry.
 They typically vary from industry to industry and are crucial to
determining a company’s ability to succeed within that industry.
 They are usually determined by the economic and technological
characteristics of the industry and by the competitive weapons on
which the firms in the industry have built their strategies.

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USING KEY SUCCESS FACTORS TO CREATE AN INDUSTRY MATRIX

 An industry matrix summarizes the key success factors within a

particular industry.
 The matrix gives a weight for each factor based on how important that
factor is for success within the industry.
 The matrix also specifies how well various competitors in the industry
are responding to each factor.

COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE

 Competitive intelligence is a formal program of gathering information

on a company’s competitors.
 Often called business intelligence, it is one of the fastest growing fields
within strategic management.
 Research indicates that there is a strong association between
corporate performance and competitive intelligence activities.

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COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE

 Sources of competitive intelligence:

 In-house libraries and computerized information systems to deal with the
growing mass of available information.
 The Internet.
 Some companies choose to use industrial espionage or other intelligence-
gathering techniques to get their information straight from their competitors.
 To combat the increasing theft of company secrets, the United States
government passed the Economic Espionage Act in 1996.

MONITORING COMPETITORS FOR STRATEGIC PLANNING

 The primary activity of a competitive intelligence unit is to monitor competitors—

organizations that offer same, similar, or substitutable products or services in the
business area in which a particular company operates.
 To understand a competitor, it is important to answer the following 10 questions:
1. Why do your competitors exist? Do they exist to make profits or just to support
another unit?
2. Where do they add customer value—higher quality, lower price, excellent credit
terms, or better service?
3. Which of your customers are the competitors most interested in? Are they
cherry-picking your best customers, picking the ones you don’t want, or going
after all of them?

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MONITORING COMPETITORS FOR STRATEGIC PLANNING

4. What is their cost base and liquidity? How much cash do they have? How
do they get their supplies?
5. Are they less exposed with their suppliers than your firm? Are their
suppliers better than yours?
6. What do they intend to do in the future? Do they have a strategic plan to
target your market segments? How committed are they to growth? Are
there any succession issues?

MONITORING COMPETITORS FOR STRATEGIC PLANNING

7. How will their activity affect your strategies? Should you adjust your plans
and operations?
8. How much better than your competitor do you need to be in order to
win customers? Do either of you have a competitive advantage in the
marketplace?
9. Will new competitors or new ways of doing things appear over the next
few years? Who is a potential new entrant?
10. f you were a customer, would you choose your product over those
offered by your competitors? What irritates your current customers?
What competitors solve these particular customer complaints?80

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MONITORING COMPETITORS FOR STRATEGIC PLANNING

 To answer these and other questions, competitive intelligence

professionals utilize a number of analytical techniques.
 In addition to the previously discussed SWOT analysis, Michael Porter’s
industry forces analysis, and strategic group analysis, some of these
techniques are Porter’s four corner exercise, Treacy and Wiersema’s
value disciplines, Gilad’s blind spot analysis, and war gaming.
 Done right, competitive intelligence is a key input to strategic
planning.

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