Strategy Implementation
You have spent the last several weeks developing your strategy and declaring a game-winning move for the company you selected for the Assignments.
- Share the game-winning move you selected for your company.
- Identify the most significant challenges you will face in successfully implementing your proposed move. These could be cultural, financial, operational, or any other factors that could undermine your new strategy.
- Identify specific steps you will take to successfully overcome these challenges. Include references to this week’s materials to support your response.
- How will you “sell” the plan to generate buy-in?
Post your initial response by Wednesday, midnight of your time zone, and reply to at least 2 of your classmates’ initial posts by Sunday, midnight of your time zone.
1st person to respond to is Chad,
Hello Dr. G. and Class,
Share the game-winning move you selected for your company.
Our lecture notes define a game-winning strategy as clear, concise, and understood by the entire organization. It is vital to success (JWI, 1). My game-winning move is moving into adjacent product segments (JWI, 2). It will involve Netflix leveraging its solid brand connection and expanding into the virtual fitness segment via a complimentary application platform called “Sweatflix”. Netflix can capitalize on its market share by offering existing users the platform for $4.99 per month, while new subscribers can access it for $8.99 per month as a stand-alone virtual fitness app. It will feature exclusive workout and fitness content curated by Netflix personalities and their favourite trainers.
Identify the most significant challenges you will face in successfully implementing your proposed move. These could be cultural, financial, operational, or any other factors that could undermine your new strategy.
Strategy often begins “at a highly abstract level” (JWI, 1). Netflix enjoys a loyal subscriber base of roughly 74.6 million in North America (Statista, 3). Still, to stay ahead of the competition, it must focus on the customer and place them at the center of the corporate mission and ongoing ideology (Sherman, 4). Some of the challenges identified when implementing this proposed move are cultural, particularly the vision (branching out into virtual fitness) (JWI, 1). I also foresee potential financial challenges (requiring significant spending to create new content and back-end platform for users) and process challenges when rolling out this new endeavour (how do we get from here to there) (JWI, 1).
Identify specific steps you will take to successfully overcome these challenges. Include references to this week’s materials to support your response.
To overcome these challenges, leadership must understand the connection between “the way people feel (dissatisfaction), where you want them to go (vision), and how they are going to get there (process)” (JWI, 1). Dissatisfaction can be internal with employees not understanding the vision and externally where customers don’t quite understand the connection. Netflix must ensure that the vision is clear and that a significant investment is committed to the game-winning move. Netflix is committing to investing more than $17 billion in the content through this year, up 25% from 2021 (Irish Times, 5). A large portion of those funds must be allocated to Sweatflix so that employees understand the importance of this internally and the results reflect well externally once customers see the quality of the content. People must feel that the destination and road-map to get there is well planned out (JWI, 1).
How will you “sell” the plan to generate buy-in?
The process must be solid, well planned, articulated effectively, and backed by significant and meaningful investment to propel the game-winning move forward and create a continued promising future at the company (JWI, 1). Netflix needs its employees engaged and excited about this proposition and requires buy-in from every level to make this a success. As Jeff Bezos is noted in Leonard Sherman’s book, “be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details” (4). To sell the vision, Netflix needs input, feedback, and engagement from its valued employee base to allow for flexibility and evolution through the process. Still, it has to be razor-focused on forging into a new market segment (4).
Regards,
Chad
Source List:
- JWI 540. 2022. Week Nine Lecture Notes.
- JWI 540. 2022. Week Six Lecture Notes.
- Statista. 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/250937/quarterly-number-of-netflix-streaming-subscribers-in-the-us/
- Leonard Sherman. 2017. If You’re in a Dogfight, Become a Cat!
5. Anna Nicolau, Christoper Grimes. 2021. The Irish Times. Streaming wars drive media groups to spend more than $100bn on new content. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/media-and-marketing/streaming-wars-drive-media-groups-to-spend-more-than-100bn-on-new-content-1.4765579#:~:text=Netflix%20is%20set%20to%20spend%20more%20than%20%2417%20billion%20on,cash%20flow%20positive%20in%202022
2nd person to respond to is Xiaodong
Hello Dr. G and Class:
Share the game-winning move you selected for your company.
The game-winning move I choose is to develop a product for Mold-Masters to combine a brazed nozzle and industry-standard parts to become a competitive new product for the hot runner market. The purpose is to disrupt the low to medium-end hot runner market, in which Mold-Master was never a significant player in this segment.
Identify the most significant challenges you will face in successfully implementing your proposed move. These could be cultural, financial, operational, or other factors that could undermine your new strategy.
Mold-Master has the capacity and resources to make this move. However, the biggest challenge is management’s mind: Mold-Master’s brazed nozzles are a critical competitive advantage. The brazed nozzle should only sell to the premium market. Using this technology in the low-end market may hurt the sales of premium products. But since we are facing a growth bottleneck right now, we need to find new growth opportunities. For the global economy after covid, the future is uncertain with the supply chain issues and inflation pressure (1). Having a product that can differentiate Mold-Master from other players in a broader market is essential for the company to reach its growth goals.
Mold-Master’s mission is to deliver an outstanding end-to-end experience to our customers. This approach will enhance the experience of low-end customers, they will receive exceptional performance they were never able to afford, so it can profitable attract and retain satisfied customers (2), to provide sustainable growth opportunities to Mold-Masters.
Identify specific steps you will take to successfully overcome these challenges. Include references to this week’s materials to support your response.
- Communicating the strategic objective, the competitive advantage, and the timing of implementation throughout the organization in a clear and meaningful way is necessary for people to embrace and internalize the strategy (3). When the whole company understands the strategy from top to bottom, this product’s design, manufacture, and marketing will work with this same purpose.
- Business alignment, where all corporate capabilities, resources, incentives, and business culture and process are aligned to support this strategic move (2).
- Adjust the organization structure and create a new value stream to design, manufacture, and sell this product.
- Monitor the key performance metrics and make time to do the update, and you will get the result you measure (4).
How will you “sell” the plan to generate buy-in?
I will focus on the ROI of this project and the impact of the market share. A reasonably small investment cab has a significant return with this proposed move. There is minimum effort for new component development, and the total estimated investment is around 500K USD. No need to make new parts since we will use existing industry-standard parts. The estimated sale will start from 300K USD per year. With a profit of 30K USD per year, the ROI will be around 6%.
The second point is this will help Mold-Masters maintain the marketing leadership position and extend the share to 25% in five to ten years.
Thanks
Xiao
Ref:
- Mohamed El-Erian. The world’s engines are spluttering: IMF points to deeper problems beyond 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/23/world-imf-forecasts-economic-growth
- Sherman, If you are in a dog fight, Become a Cat!
- JWI540 week nine lectures note
- EOP video, week nine. Jack Welch.
