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Eric Adler and Julian Chabbott, roommates from Babson University created and founded a free iPhone application called Line Snob. This application gives real time information and wait times and rely on its users to submit information for other users to look at. To create an incentive so that the application’s users submit reliable information it would reward users through points that could be redeemed for coupons for reporting on the lines they’re standing in.

Official Site

These two men are entrepeneurs. An entrepreneur is a person who has possession of a new enterprise, venture or idea that addresses a current issue and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome. The issue that Eric and Julian wants to address is having to wait in lines. They realize that almost everybody dislike waiting in line to reach a destination or to watch a movie at the cinema, but there is currently no solution in avoiding it. So they came up with the idea of an application that informs people of wait lines, Line Snob. Of course there are inherent risks, such that it relies on users to provide information however it won’t attract users if it have no reliable information, creating the chicken or the egg comes first dilemma. Yet, they stuck to their idea and showed perseverance that allowed them to achieve success.

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Lockheed Martin, the United States aerospace, defense, security and advanced technology company’s Full Spectrum Leadership initiative has been running for four years and has created a “shift in how it selects, assesses, and develops leaders—and how those leaders set objectives.” This major cultural shift has taken root in the 140,000 employees on the company’s payroll and good changes are seen in the executives and managers that has positively affected how the organization goes about and does businesses. The core of this leadership culture is accountability; leaders are not only measured on their results, but how they achieved them.

Changing a company’s culture is not an easy thing to do. According to John Kotter, there is eight steps in hot to effectively implement chang. First, is to establish a sense of urgency by creating a compelling reason on why change is needed. Second, form a coalition with enough power to lead the change. Third, create a vision to direct the change and strategies to achieve it. Four, communicate the vision. Five, empower others to act on the vision. Six, plan for, create and reward short term “wins” that move the organization towards the new vision. Seven, consolidate improvements and reassess changes and make necessary improvements. Finally, reinforce the changes by relating new behaviours with organizational success.

A supply chain is a system of organizations, people, technology, activities, information and resources involved in moving a product or service from supplier to customer.

Motorola is investing more than US$60 million dollars over two years to manage its global supply chain from Singapore. Currently Motorola manages US$10 billion of activities each year in the supply chain operations, such as manufacturing and distributions.  The investment will be spent not only on manpower, but also research and development. Motorola also hopes to work together with the local academia to enhance manufacturing processes.

By centralizing its supply chain operations in Singapore, Ed Zanders, Motorola’s CEO hopes to improve cost structure, enhance quality of manufacturing and bringing products faster into the market to achieve a world-class supply chain operation. By bringing products faster into the market so that consumers could buy them, Motorola can reduce its product cycles (amount of time needed to bring new products into the market) from 6-9 months. This will lessen their inventory and improve inventory turnover. Singapore will be a “control tower” where the transformation process of inputs into outputs (Motorola cellphones) will be monitored and controlled. This is the company’s strategy in order to become more competitive.

Article on Businessweek

Energy consumption has increased dramatically in the past century due to industries shifting away from coal to fossil fuels, the development of new technologies, the human population growing exponentially and the rise of energy for personal use. This is affecting the earth in a significant way by causing global climate change, ozone depletion, desertification and many other phenomena. There is a fear that by striving to meet our current needs, we will deplete the earth’s resources.

The idea of sustainability is meeting our present needs without compromising the needs of future generations. As the public becomes more informed of the adverse effects of excessive energy consumption through the media, there is a push for industries to adopt Corporate Social Responsibility, which means “achieving economic growth with social and environmental limits”.

Take Wal-Mart for example. In this article from Bloomberg, it states that last year Wal-Mart announced that it will be launching a sustainability index and that “it expects the products on its shelves to comply.” Wal-Mart has adopted a CSR and this will help the retailer to measure its sustainability and enact policies in order to become more sustainable. It will also push producers that supply Wal-Mart’s shelves to become more sustainable as well.

Other companies and their CSR

The word strategy in the context of business is often misunderstood and abused. In the business world, a company’s strategy directs its direction in the long term, while a tactic is how the company meets a short term specific objective. Take a look at this article from CNN that talks about Tribune Co. filing a new reorganization program that aims to keep the media conglomerate intact. This is an example of a strategy. Now take a look at another article about Warrent Buffet hiring a new investment manager for Berkshire Hathaway. This is an example of a business tactic.

Porter’s Five Forces is a framework for analyzing how attractive an industry is. The five forces are the bargaining power of suppliers, the bargaining power of buyers, the threat of substitute products, barriers to entry and the intensity of competitive rivalry. Many other academics and strategists as like Stewart Neill,  Kevin P. Coyne and Somu Subramaniam have criticized Porter’s model. They state that it only works with the underlying assumptions that buyers, suppliers and competitors do not collude. that structural advantage is a source of value and that uncertainty is low, allowing planned responds to competitive behaviour by the market’s participants. An extension to Porter’s Five Forces was made by adding complementors as a sixth force to explain strategic alliances. This model is called the Six Forces Model.