Strategic Management

Guokui Li

Alliant International University

1. Key Point/s (1) from each Chapter readings.

 Chapter 1: Competition for the future is competition to create and dominate

emerging opportunities—to stake out new competitive space. Creating the future

is more challenging than playing catch up, in that you have to create your own

road map.

Chapter 2: we believe that managers are spending too much time managing the

present, and not enough creating the future. But to create the future, a company

must first be able to forget some of its past. 

Chapter 3: The more successful a company has been, the flatter its forgetting

curve. 

Chapter 4:  To build the best possible assumption base about the future and

thereby develop the prescience needed to proactively shape industry evolution.

Example of firm/s that applied “Learning to Forget”? Firm/s that did not…

and consequences?

We have a company named Tencent in China. It was the biggest social media

application(QQ) company in China. And when the smartphone appeared, they are

not immersed in success of QQ. They created a social media app for smartphone

at the first time, also named QQ. Then they created a new app named WeChat for

smartphone.

If a company did not apply “Learning to Forget” like Nokia. Nokia was the

largest mobile phone maker in the world. But now, I cannot see any Nokia phones

in my life.

2. Example of Strategy as Stretch in Action… Examples of firm/s succeeding

 with strategy?

Gray Hamel and C.K. Prahalad argue that:” Long-term competitiveness depends

on managers’ willingness to challenge continually their managerial frames.” On

top of that they believe that a company that is doing badly didn’t have too much

resources it didn’t get buyers for, but rather it didn’t have high enough ambitions.

They say that “Creating stretch, a misfit between resources and aspirations, is the

single most important task senior management faces.”

As an example, they say that there were times when CNN was providing 24 hour

news coverage with one fifth of the budget of CBS turning out only 1 hour of

news in the evening.

3. Bonus Question: What is AirBnB Business Model? How did it overcome the

“Trust” factor?

The AirBnB Business Model is such that the booking and monetary transactions

are done on Airbnb’s platform. This is from where the company earns its share of

revenue from 2 different sources which have been explained below: Commission

from Property Owners.

Building for trust, they built profile pages where they could upload pictures of

themselves, write a description about who they are, link social media accounts,

and highlight feedback from past trips. Over time we’ve emphasized these

identity pages more and more. They chose to handle payments, a complicated

technical challenge, but one that would enable them to better understand who was

making a booking.