Basic Strategic Trends
1. Globalization: It refers to the tendency of firm to extend their sales , ownership , and /or manufacturing to new markets abroad. Firms are globalizing their production , too , by putting facilities where they’ll be most advantageous. Globalization has strategic implications. Firms that once competed only with local firms – from airlines to automakers to banks – now face foreign competitors. More globalization means more competition and more competition means more pressure to improve – to lower costs , to make employees more productive , and to find new ways to do things better and less expensively.
2. Technological Advances: Similarly , the internet and information technology have been forcing and enabling –firms to became more competitive.
3. The Nature of Work: Technology is doing more than reducing cost and opening up new ways to compete , It’s also changing the nature of work. Knowledge intensive high-tech manufacturing jobs in such industries as aerospace , computers , telecommunications , home electronics , pharmaceuticals and medical instruments are replacing factory jobs in steel , auto , rubber and textiles. Even heavy manufacturing jobs are becoming more high tech. Technology is not the only trend driving this change from brawn to brains , There is also a continuing shift from manufacturing jobs to service jobs. These service jobs in turn require new types of knowledge workers , new HR management methods to manage them , and a new focus on human capital.
4. Human Capital: It refers to the knowledge , education , training , skills and expertise of a firm’s workers and you can see it’s more important than it has ever been before. The center of gravity in employment is moving fast from manual and clerical workers to knowledge workers who resist the command and control model that business took from the military 100 years ago. Firms need new , world class HR systems to select , train and motivate these employees and to win their commitment to the technologies and continuous improvement programs firms today depend on.
5. The Workforce: Workforce demographics are changing as well. Most notably , the workforce is becoming more diverse as women , minority group members , and older workers enter the workforce. Diversity has been defined as “ any attribute that humans are likely to use to tell themselves , that person is different from me” and thus includes such factors as race , sex , age , values , and cultural norms. Creating unanimity from a diverse workforce may turn out to be a considerable challenge for HR. There are two fundamental and inconsistent realities operating today with regard to diversity. One is that organizations claim they seek to maximize diversity in the work place , and maximize the capabilities of such a diverse workforce. The other is that traditional human resources systems will not allow diversity , only similarity. Employers traditionally hire , appraise and promote people who fit their image of what their firm’s employees who fit their image of what their firm’s employees should believe and act like and there’s a tendency to screen out those who don’t fit. Establishing HR programs that don’t just pay lip service to diversity may thus be a challenge for many employers.
6. Global Expansion: Managers have to craft strategies that balance opportunities and threats like those above with their firm’s strengths and weaknesses , and this has produced the strategies and organizational changes with which you’re already probably familiar. A strategy of global expansion has been perhaps the most obvious response to these trends.
7. Improved Competitiveness: It’s a another popular strategy , aimed at buttressing the firm’s strengths and reducing its weaknesses. This strategy manifests itself in many ways : in downsizing , to boost productivity , in mergers , to achieve increased size while stripping redundant cost , in programs aimed at continuously improving operations and in using the web to integrate channels. This lets firms and their suppliers and customers interact directly and thus further strip costs from operations.
8. Organizational Changes: Global expansion and improved competitiveness are in turn driving other organizational changes , rather than pyramidal chains with 9 or 10 levels , firms are flat , self-directed teams of empowered employees , close to the customers , now make decisions that once had to be shifted up for managerial review.
9. Boundary Less Decision Making: It means employees interact freely across departmental and level boundaries to get the information and decisions they need quickly.
10. Knowledge Management: Initiatives mean systems are in place to ensure that employees across the company can share their special expertise.
11. Power: The bases of power are also therefore changing. In the new workplace , says one expert , position , title , and authority are no longer adequate tools for managers to rely on to get their jobs done. Instead success depends increasingly on tapping in to sources of good ideas , on figuring out whose collaboration is needed to act on those ideas , and on working with both to produce results.
