Trigger 2

Learning objective 1. How to utilize your existing resources to expand your business? (Company’s mission)

A company’s mission statement is communicating the purpose of the organization. Commonly the organizations update their mission statement when the organization evolves. Examples of mission statements:

• KONE: “To improve the flow of urban life.”
• Nike: "To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world."
• Starbucks: "To inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time."
• Chevron: "To be the global energy company most admired for its people, partnership and performance."
• Amazon: "To be the most customer-centric company in the world, where people can find and discover anything they want to buy online."
• Intel: "Delight our customers, employees and shareholders by relentlessly delivering the platform and technology advancements that become essential to the way we work and live."
• eBay: "Provide a global trading platform where practically anyone can trade practically anything."
• Coca-Cola: “To refresh the world in mind, body and spirit. To inspire moments of optimism and happiness through our brands and actions.”

Definition of business resources – according to www.businessdictionary.com is: “Human, financial, physical, and knowledge factors that provide a firm the means to perform its business processes.”

Utilizing resources to expand the business is probably a differentiator in the success the great companies demonstrated during times. And this does not only refer to financial power or geographical presence that enabled companies to expand globally, but refers also to the human and knowledge resources that would enable a company to expand products portfolio or completely reshape the company’s purpose: this may simply start from an internal (or external) survey on collecting ideas and with the support of marketing and research and development departments implement this ideas in practice.
 

Sources:

1. Mission statement, Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_statement
2. What is a Mission Statement? By Nicole Fallon Taylor, Jan 2015 - http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/3783-mission-statement.html
3. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/business-resources.html

Learning objective 2. How to foresee trends? (Company’s vision)
a)    How do you translate this into a company’s vision?

A vision statement is a declaration of an organization's objectives, ideally based on economic foresight, intended to guide its internal decision-making.

Mission statements and vision statements fill different purposes. A mission statement describes an organization's purpose and answers the questions "What business are we in?" and "What is our business for?" A vision statement provides strategic direction and describes what the owner or founder wants the company to achieve in the future.

Jean Van Rensselar identifies a trend as “a distillation of a novelty---a novelty plus time. You can predict a trend by anticipating what will remain of a novelty in a year. In short, a novelty is the tidal wave and a trend is what’s left on the beach after the tidal wave recedes. Anyone can recognize a trend once the tidal wave has receded; the trick is to predict what will be left on the beach while the tidal wave is still on the horizon.” The article “5 Ways to Predict a Trend” continues with how to identify a trend while in novelty stage:

• It is obviously useful
• It has broad appeal and application
• It is sustainable
• It meshes with other trends
• It has some history

A good example on how to translate trends into the company vision is presented by Accenture in the study “Technology Vision 2016”. We are witnessing a digital evolution, with technology advances and unlimited opportunities when change becomes the new normal.

• Intelligent automation - the true visionaries use intelligent automation to create a new digital world where they are masters of competitive advantage
• Liquid workforce - by exploiting technology to enable workforce transformation, leading companies will create highly adaptable and change-ready enterprise environments that are able to meet today’s dynamic digital demands (according to a study, 43% of the US workforce will be freelancers in 2020)
• Platform economy - it’s the platform-based business models and strategies they enable that are driving the most profound global macroeconomic change since the industrial revolution. In the digital economy, platform ecosystems are nothing less than the foundation for new value creation (81% of executives say platform-based business models will be core to their growth strategy within three years)
• Predictable disruption - ecosystems are born digital, and unhindered by industry boundaries (82% say industry boundaries are being erased and new paradigms are emerging for every industry)
• Digital trust - as security risks increase, so do opportunities to earn customer trust (83% agree that trust is the cornerstone of the digital economy)

 Sources:

1. Vision statement, Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_statement  
2. “5 Ways to Predict a Trend” by Jean Van Rensselar - http://www.businessknowhow.com/marketing/spottrend.htm
3. “Technology Vision 2016”, Accenture - https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-it-tech-trends-summary

Learning objective 3. How to create strategy based on vision and mission? (Company’s strategy)

Strategy is a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty.

Mission and vision are leading to a strategy that needs to be implemented in order to accomplish the set objectives. For a strategy to be viable, the following questions should be answered:

• Why is the company in business?
• What are we best at doing?
• Which customers should we continue to serve or start serving?
• Which products/services should we stop offering, continue to offer, or start offering?
• Why have we decided on these strategic directions?

 Sources: 

1. Strategy, Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy
2. Defining Your Business Strategy, FastTrac, Kauffman Foundation - http://www.entrepreneurship.org/resource-center/defining-your-business-strategy.aspx