Global Warming

A recent report on global warming that described a scientific study read as below:

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The climate is heating up far faster than scientists had predicted, spurred by sharp increases in greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries like China and India, a top climate scientist said on Saturday.

“The consequence of that is we are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we’ve considered seriously,” Chris Field, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

Field said “the actual trajectory of climate change is more serious” than any of the climate predictions in the IPCC’s fourth assessment report called “Climate Change 2007.”

It is interesting to note how the causality for climate “heating up far faster than scientists had predicted” has been directly and as if entirely linked to emerging countries like India and China. In the same lines it is worth noting that while emerging countries can certainly take more steps towards curtailing GHG emissions, the so called ‘developed’ world is still the largest emitter of GHG. It is ridiculous for countries like US and UK to lift their hand up and say that they will cut down on GHG only if and after emerging countries double up and match their endeavors.

The ‘developed’ countries are the ones who have destroyed wealth in most of the now emerging countries with their capital muscle growing obviously by dining on stolen meat from the now emerging countries not so far in the history, it is imperative that these ‘developed’ countries get their act together on all policies relating to GHG emission and then start comparing themselves with those that are economically incapable [at least in the short run] of matching such efficacy.

Comments welcome.

Peace,

K

Strategy: The Philosophies

Strategy

The term strategy, though it has been discussed in academic circles for at least for about half a century now and in the ancient philosophies for several centuries, organizational strategy has as many meanings as there are executives and experts making sense of it.

While some view strategy as ‘planning’, others emphasize ‘action’. There is yet another school of thought positing strategy as integration of the action and planning.

Governing the dynamics of ‘emerging’ strategy as well as influencing the ‘plans’ a particular strategy is made up of are factors that can be broadly classified as institutional, industry, and organizational. These theories explored extensively in strategic management literature facilitate in the understanding of antecedents of strategy formulated and implemented. The importance of factoring practical implications of what have come to be known as the three views of strategic management, viz., institution-based view, industry-based view, and resource-based view, in being able to both formulate and implement organizational strategy is critical to the success of a strategy.

Further, strategy, even in its original military form, always has been dealt in the realms of conceptualizations and abstracts. The very quintessence of a strategy is in its abstraction. Only so long as your strategy remains unique and abstract to decipher does it lend you a competitive advantage. Abstraction, however, doesn’t imply complexity in any sense. Here abstraction is in developing strategies that your competitors can sense but are unable to directly replicate it to create value in their organization. If however, any intent / action / outcome indeed creates value but is not abstract enough to make it difficult for your competitor to replicate, it limits itself to being a tactical move. Tactics can emerge out of strategies conceptualized, yet these need not individually or collectively form the strategy. Tactics aim at providing short term competitive advantage.

Span of Competitive Advantage

Every organization must engage in exploring its product/service competitiveness. Span of competitiveness can be temporal as well as latitudinal. Temporal span of competitiveness measures for how long does a particular strategy or tactic provide competitive advantage. Latitude of competitive advantage is the number of product/service offerings of an organization that can benefit from the competitive advantage derived out of an organizational strategy or tactic.

Span of Competitive Advantage

To illustrate: if Samsung decides to compete with Sony in the latter’s all geographic as well as product markets. For Samsung to successfully do this:

- Samsung would have to understand the ‘clockspeed’¹ of each geography and product market.

- Identify specific geographies and products which give Sony the longest temporal span of competitiveness

- Identify industry/institutional/organizational factors that Samsung can draw upon for its benefits

- Devise a Quadrant IV strategy in a maximum of two out of every three markets that is critical to Sony AND Quadrant II/III in the remaining one third or markets suitably

Lessons for a Winning Strategist

1. For a winning strategy always think long term; Compliment it with short term tactics

2. Use Span of Competitive Advantage to facilitate devising your strategy and tactics

3. Draw insights from Institutional, Industry and Resource-based theories

- Karthik

Hello world!

Namaste / Hello / Bonjour,

Blogging has emerged as an unprecedented phenomenon among the various kinds of knowledge sharing platforms. Not making the best use of such a powerful tool with a huge audience towards sharing what i know and learning what i am yet to would be really mindless of me.

So here i am, putting in my own words the best as well as not so best words i can ever say to this world, of course keeping to myself everything else am still surmising upon, which i prefer to discuss with a smaller group of known people.

Some of the first few posts discuss topics that i had written over the past couple of years.

I hope all of you people who are enthusiastic about making this world a better place to live by sharing knowledge shall provide your comments and share your insights freely on this blog.

Many Thanks in Advance!

Karthik