Value of a Company Wide Perspective by Dr. Robert Wiseman

Last Updated July 1, 2019

Transcription

What this certificate provides you with is a perspective on the entire organization and how all of the different aspects of a company contribute to the firm performance and how those should be balanced to avoid making errors. In other words, companies can be dominated by specific, functional areas if not considering the full strategic impact of those functional areas.

A good example is companies that have been dominated by what I call the “tyranny of finance and marketing” where they look at new technologies that are emerging within their industry and they judge those to be not profitable because they’re still new and customers may not be gravitating towards those new technologies.

So, from a marketing perspective, nobody wants to buy them and from a finance perspective, there’s not a good return on investment.

By taking those two very narrow perspectives on new technologies that are emerging with an industry, companies can fall behind.

Eventually, those new technologies are going to take over. A strategic perspective would recognize that and recognize that companies – the organization – needs to start to move toward new technologies even at the early stages when customers are still leery of them and the return on investment is not high.

Otherwise, you risk falling behind competitors and new entrants into the industry. I would say there are three things that they’ll take away from this certificate program. First is an appreciation of how markets work. How does a business actually earn a return in a specific market?

The second is – how are decisions made at the strategic level and what affects the quality of those decisions.

And finally, why do companies engage in multiple businesses? And does it make sense? Why is General Electric in so many different businesses and does that model really work? Can it be generalized?

And why do so many companies fail in acquiring other businesses in mergers?