Oprah Winfrey

The Oprah Winfrey Network

BMIHMS November 14, 2013 Authored by: Luis Benavides Lecturer: Juliet Tan BBC302 Business Management Entrepreneurship

Executive Summary
Born in the United States, Oprah Winfrey has gained fame and power by using charisma and her communication gifts in a smart way. We will be addressing her history and her personality traits in order to identify the factors that made this entrepreneur so famous and how she became one of the most powerful women in the world.

In order to get this information, this report will be referenced on the Forbes diary, several of her biographies around the internet and one of her biography books.

We will reach the conclusion that Oprah knew how to play the marketing game and that she knew how to build her personal brand in an attempt to leave her past behind and go from a little scared and mistreated girl to the woman she is now by breaking all the barriers she had to go through and to bypass all the obstacles in front of her. Its recommended for people that read this report to approach it with an open mind and genuine curiosity in order to enjoy most of it.

Contents
Executive Summary .................................................................................................. 1 History of Oprah Winfrey ........................................................................................... 3 Oprahs Mindset and Personality .............................................................................. 4 Competitive Strategies used by Oprah ...................................................................... 5 Entrepreneur on Business Management and Intrepreneurial Pursuits ....................... 5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 6 Referencing .............................................................................................................. 7 Appendix ................................................................................................................... 8

History of Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Gail Winfrey, well known for being a TV show is also a producer, actress, business owner, philanthropist and author of books. She was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi the 29th of January in 1954. Considered the most powerful in 2005, she is indeed one of the most powerful influences of the XX century. This Afro-American woman is an admirable entrepreneur as she wasnt born in a good nor wealthy position. Her childhood was very hard. During her early childhood, Oprah suffered abuses that affected her physically and psychologically. When she was nine, her cousin and her uncle raped her. She got pregnant when she was 14 due the mistreatments she was being under. As a sign of faith and humanity, she decided to keep the baby; sadly she had a miscarriage before the baby could be even born. With a strong mind and proposed goals in a stable manner in her mind, she decided to keep going. When she was 19, she got a scholarship and decided to study Communications in the University of Tennessee; she started working as a reporter in a radio station in Nashville where she even won Beauty Contests. The first step in her business journey in TV started thanks to the contract she celebrated with Chicagos WSL-TV that offered her a job as a presenter in a TV Talk Show called People are Talking lasting for 8 years due her great cognitive and social skills in front of the camera. She took another big step in her career when WSL-TV hired her to be the own presenter of her own TV Morning Show. Her great charisma soon turned this small TV show successful and soon it was renamed to The Oprah Winfrey Show which is very famous and still has a really big rating on TV despite its age. Oprah has also succeeded as an actress in several movies and has shown empathy for the people that live in a bad situation at the moment. She has demonstrated that, after all, being a good entrepreneurship is not just having a lot of money but to be able to work hard and be able to take whatever that comes without whining about unfortunate events that happen to him or her.

Oprahs Mindset and Personality

Oprah has passion for what she does. She is and empathetic woman and she care about inspiring her team members by worrying about their well-being outside work. Day to day, her team members do backup the professionalism that she represents. The businesswoman has donated more than fifty million dollars to charities, she has one of her own and a scholarship program that benefits women, children, families and students that wish to make a change on their communities. When she decided to create Harpo, she got help from Jeff Jacobs, a lawyer that became her business partner after creating Harpo, Inc in 1986. The main objective of Harpo was to take care of her program The Oprah Winfrey Show The key to success for this couple was how much the complemented each other. Oprah was the creative, charismatic and intelligent part of the relationship while Jacobs was a business man with a lot of knowledge about how the business works and also with a big understanding of the laws and norms related to intellectual property. After the success arrived, Oprah and Jacobs focused in hiring people that enjoyed the program. People that wanted to work with Oprah had to inspire her trust as it was considered the main requisite by the diva. Soon after, and in an effort to make the company grow, Oprah hired her previous boss as her general manager. He was responsible of creating the departments of her company such as human resources and accountability. It can be seen in here that a growing business needs qualified and trained staff, willing to assume the challenges brought by the own responsibilities of the job. Such strategy was used by Henry Ford. He thought that because his main job was to think, he had to responsibly delegate the operational tasks and duties to competitive professionals.

Competitive Strategies used by Oprah

The Oprah TV Show has a diverse range of competitors on TV. Hallmark and Lifetime WE are always changing in order to compete with the shows launched by Oprah Winfrey. Being the most powerful TV program for women at the moment, Oprah has been using the Bypass Strategy in order to diversify her show. This is, Oprah always tries to differentiate her show from others by doing new things and this helps in luring more people to watch her network. By being consistent and using a multicultural approach in her TV show Oprah applies the Bypass strategy in an effort to make her program different from the ones aired on Hallmark and Lifetime WE. The second example would be against the Ellen DeGeneres show. Both of these TV shows are really successful therefore Oprah has to use a Flanker Attack in order to gain something from it. Oprahs TV Network created a website, a magazine, a radio channel and her own mobile device app in order to offer more to the show viewer, Ellen DeGeneres in comparison, cannot do this because of the nature of her program and the fact that she doesnt own the network her TV show airs on.

Entrepreneur on Business Management and Intrepreneurial Pursuits

Oprah has diversified her established business by creating strategic alliances with the TV distributor King World in order to distribute her TV Show. She has also created an alliance between The Oprah Winfrey Show and the ABC TV Chain in order to distribute her TV Movies. Thinking about her market target which are Women, Children and Educative Sector; she invested in Oxygen Media LLC. This company owns a women-targeted cable network to which creates a TV show called Live your Life for. By doing this People automatically felt carried by her charisma and it was no lie that her ideas were not bad but perfect. Considering her own success, she immigrated to other markets and created new companies such as: Harpo Productions, Harpo Studios, Harpo Films, Harpo Print LLC and Harpo Video. She also created and launched her own self-improvement magazine called The Oprah Magazine. The success of the magazine turned out better than expected and surpassed its growth expectations. Oprah has also made her TV show and TV network very available to people, with over more than 24 seasons and 5,000 episodes, Oprah includes a lot of variety in her TV show. She succeeds in Marketing by making the watcher feel that he or she is part of the TV show as the people that are presented in The Oprah Winfrey show do represent the social or cultural background of everybody. This has put the show as the leader of audience in the US, even over her top competitors.

Conclusion
Oprah Winfrey does indeed fulfil the seven perspectives of the Entrepreneurship, and the example of this is how much she has earned and how many things she has created. It is obvious she has passion for people and this is why people think of her as the best friend they could have. The Creation of Employment is fulfilled by how she treats her staff and how she is worried about her well-being. The Creation of Value is fulfilled through the evolution of her TV emporium. She has created a Radio Channel, a Website and her own TV network in order to supply to the watcher options of value in a better, faster and easier way. Her Creation of Growth goes along with the Creation of Value as by creating all her assets she would be a total example of how she does cares about the growth of her company. Her Creation of Wealth is exemplified by how rich she is. She is not worried about trying new things and she is not worried about assuming risks as long as it gets her profit and well-being to the company. The Creation of Enterprise is reflected on the branches of her network she created, such as Radio, Cinema and other TV Shows. Her Creation of Innovation goes along all the more than 5,000 episodes of her program that wouldnt be possible to reach without the correct renewal of her ideas. The Creation of Change has been shown by Oprah along all these more than 20 years shes been on air. She has reinvented herself and she has succeeded in this. Personally, I think Oprah as a businesswoman, She does not stops being an entrepreneur as she assumes new challenges and she studies her new possibilities of success in new ventures. She has concise goals in her businesses an also she does have an immense attitude for helping people which is a potential requisite for the creation and running of an organization as the clients want to be included and being understood, not just seen as a number or an item. I think that her decision of finishing her TV Show when she was fifty-seven years old was undoubtedly, a decision to expand in a significative way her entrepreneur gifts. She stopped just to have a more active role in her organization empire going from her own TV cable network to her O Magazine. After Eight Grammy Prices, more than a million people in the show and more than 30,000 delegates in her TV Show, Oprah is a real example of entrepreneurship and hard work. And she is a live example of how even in the adversity; you can achieve what you want if you really propose to do it.

Referencing
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Appendix