Strategic capabilities darden Essay Example for Free

Strategic capabilities darden Essay Strategic Capabilities In this part of the report the different capabilities of Darden will be explained and which of these capabilities lead to competitive rivalry. But first the different resources and competences will be discussed which will lead to the capabilities. 1) Resource; A physical resource of Darden is; There different restaurants, with this is meant the different buildings that Darden owns with the different kind of restaurants. 1) Competence; The competence that Darden has is; To make different kind of dishes. 1) Capability When the above mentioned resource ad competence are linked then the following capability emerges; Flexible to make different dishes for different markets. Darden has 8 different brands. Each brand standing for its own kind of food like; Italian of seafood. This means that Darden offers all kinds of food to the consumers. After applying the VRIN model to this capability the conclusion is; V- This capability is a value for the consumers due to the fact that Darden gives them the opportunity to choice between different restaurants. This capability allows Darden to be profitable in the market. R- Different brands plus products are included in one chain. Unfortunately for Darden is capability is not Rare, different competitors have the same kind of capability. ( for example Laundry’s, DineEquity) I- This capability is possible to imitate, but this will take some time and the right amount of financial resources. N- This capability is possible to substitute by another company. For example Yum Restaurants, they have also different dishes for different markets with their Taco bell, KFC and Pizza Hut. Conclusion Capability 1); The above mentioned capability is not one that is unique and that is not difficult to imitate, but however it is still a strength for Darden due to the fact it gives Darden a great brand image, and it gives it an advantage compared to their smaller competitors who do not have this capability as strong as Darden. 2) Resource; A Human resource that Darden has is: Well trained and guided staff. 2) Competence; A competence that Darden has is; Skill to buy the best products (for example Darden sources top quality seafood from more than 100 varieties. 2) Capability; When the above mentioned Resources and competence are combined then the following capability emerges; Capable of making high-quality food. High quality is always something under discussion, what is high quality? In this case is meant food that has a very good quality versus cost proportion. And speaks to a lot of people. After applying the VRIN model to this capability the conclusion is; V- This capability has a great value for the consumers because a good quality versus cost proportion is something that quest will remember and will tell to their friends and families. R- This capability is not rare, there are a lot of restaurants that can make high quality food against a good price for the consumers. I- Is this capability Imitational, yes when looking at the above mentioned point ( R) there it shows other restaurants are already doing this. N- This capability can be substitute, what has been explained earlier is that restaurants are already having the same kind of capability. Conclusion Capability 2) The capability of making high-quality food is very important for Darden because consumers expect a level of quality when they go to one of Dardens restaurants. For this case it is a strength of Darden. However it is not a very strong capability due to the fact that multiple competitors are doing the same and that it is very easy to imitate or substitute. 3) Resource; A resource that Darden has is; There strong marketing. 3) Competence; A competence that Darden has is; Using all kinds of advertising. 3) Capability; When the above mentioned resource and competence are combined then the following capability emerges; Dardens ability to market its restaurants. Darden is a leading advertiser in the full size dining segment of the hospitality industry. Darden uses different kind of methods to advertise their brands, like local and cable television, digital advertising, billboards, search engine marketing, radio and newspapers. After applying the VRIN model to this capability the following conclusion can be made; V-; This capability will generate more consumers which will bring more revenue, if the cost are low enough to be profitable in this part then this can be a huge Value to the company. For the consumers this will also be a Value because they stay up to date with new actions, menu changes and promotions. R-; This capability is not rare at all, almost every company has a marketing department and advertises itself. I-; Marketing is very imitational due to the fact that everybody sees them so other companies can easily use the same kind of method, However due to the fact that Darden has multiple brands is can target and advertise to all these markets at the same time which gives them an advantage. N-; This capability can be substituted by a different company, because there are already companies with multiple brands that target and advertise to different markets. (Laundry’s) Conclusion Capability 3) Of the 3 capabilities mentioned in this part of the report, capability 3 is the weakest. It is still an important part of the company, but it is very difficult to stand out on marketing now a day compared to competitors. It is more a capability that is at least required to be successful. Conclusion Capabilities When looking at the 3 different capabilities explained in this part the capabilities concerning the different dishes and the high quality of food are two strong and important capabilities that Darden has. The marketing capability is not as strong but it is still a plus point of the company. Without the marketing Darden would not be as successful as it is today.

The Nature of a Crazy Family in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying :: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

The Nature of a Crazy Family in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying "My mother is a fish." (p. 79) I think that this statement typifies the entire family. There is something not-quite-right about all of them. Vardeman, as Cora Tull says on page 70, is "outen his head with grief and worry" for his mother. He has confused her with the fish because they both died on the same day. In his child's mind he cannot differentiate between the two. Throughout the novel he refers to his mother as a fish, as on page 196. In this scene, he is looking at the vultures that have gathered over the wagon. Darl and Cash are trying to get Cash's broken leg situated better for the rest of the ride. Vardeman thinks that his "mother is not in the box. My mother does not smell like that. My mother is a fish." Darl is slowly going crazy. He is referred to as being "queer, lazy, pottering about the place no better than Anse" on page 24. However, his true madness is not shown until his monologue at the end of the novel after he has been arrested for burning the barn. Cash believes he did so to try to rid them of Addie's body, but Darl never reveals his motivations. In his final section he seems to be looking in on himself. He refers to his body as Darl, and he asks himself "'What are you laughing at?'" All the answer he gets is "'Yes yes yes yes yes'" (253). Dewey Dell is obsessed with sex and her unwanted pregnancy. Every man that looks at her she looks at with "her eyes kind of blaring up and going hard like [they] had made to touch her" as she does with Tull on page 124. Even in trying to get rid of the fetus, however, she is confronted with sex. She is none the wiser to the wiles of the ‘doctor’ until afterwards when she says, â€Å"’It won’t work [ . . . ] I just know it won’t’† (252). Jewel has some less-than-healthy fascination with his horse. While he frequently beats it about the head, he still refers to it as a â€Å"’sweet son of a bitch’† (13). He was willing to work all night every night for weeks in order to buy the horse, and he disappears for a while when Anse barters it for the new team.

Enron: the smartest guys in the room Essay

Enron Corporation was an energy, commodities, and service company out of Houston, Texas founded by Kenneth Lay in 1985. Lay built natural gas power energy in East Texas which helped Enron’s stock rise. Louis Borget, Andrew Fastow, and Jeffery Skilling were the top management executives from 1985 until 2001. Each helped to bring about the demise of the company in multiple ways. One of the first scandals in Enron involved President Louis Borget and two traders were discovered betting on Enron Stocks. The company books were altered to inflate profits so that the company appeared to be more profitable that it actually was. Borget was diverting company money into personal offshore accounts. Auditors tried to uncover the problem, but Borget and the traders had a separate set of books that they kept from the auditors. Kenneth Lay, who was aware of this unethical practice, and encouraged Borget to continue â€Å"making us millions†, two months later the separate set of books we re brought to the investigators and Enron fired the two traders and Borget had to serve one year in jail. After his biggest money maker was put behind bars Lay needed to find him a new money maker. So Lay hired Jeffrey Skilling to be the CEO. Jeffrey Skilling would only accept job if Enron adopted a mark-to-market accounting strategy. Mark-to-market accounting allowed the company to book potential profits on certain projects immediately after contracts were signed, regardless of the actual profits that the deal would eventually make. This gave Enron the ability to look like they were a profitable company. Skilling put together a performance review committee that graded employees and fired the bottom fifteen percent each year which made the employees very competitive and created a very tough working environment. Traders were very aggressive and they made it to where if you wanted to be in the market you didn’t have a choice to deal with Enron. Trading became the main reported profit for Enron. Skilling hired two guys that became his top lieutenants Lou Pai and Cliff Baxter. They were known as the â€Å"Guy with Spikes†. Baxter was a very smart guy and was Enron’s Chief deal maker. He was manic-depressive and best friends with Skilling. Pai was the CEO of Enron Energy Services. He was  very mysterious guy who employees say was never in the office. Pai only seemed to care about two things, money and strippers. He would bring strippers into the office and would put everything he spent in the strip clubs onto an expense reports to be reimbursed by Enron. All of Pai’s time in the strip clubs caught up to him and caused him to get a divorce. Once he got a divorce he sold all of his stock and resigned from Enron. He came out of Enron better than anyone cashing in his stock and receiving approximately two hundred and fifty million dollars. The division of Enron that Pai ran lost a total of around one billion dollars which was covered up by Enron. Enron had success in the bull market brought on by the dot-com bubble. Enron’s stock prices increased to record prices. The games was called â€Å"pump and dump† top executives would pump up the stock prices and then sell their million dollar options. Everyone at Enron was consumed with the stock price. Stock prices were even posted in the elevators for everyone to see. Enron launched a PR campaign to make itself look profitable even with all aspects of the company operating poorly. Skilling’s philosophy was to take high risks because these deals would make more money. One of these high risk deals was building a power plant in India, which nobody wanted to do because India could not afford the high prices. The company lost a billion dollars on this project but that fact was covered up by Skilling. The company paid out multi-million dollar bonus to executive on non-existent profits. Enron bought out Portland General Energy which gave them access to the deregulated market of California. All of the employees in PGE had bought their stock so when Enron took over all of the stock PGE stock became Enron. The Portland General Energy workers had always invested their 401k into stock which converted to Enron. These employees continued to purchase stock because of their trust in Enron. Enron’s main motivation for buying the company was to operate in California since they held the highest demand for energy in the United States. Enron’s traders would trick California’s electricity supply and export the energy to another state causing California to have blackouts. By California having these black outs they raised the energy rate in the state. Although Enron’s stock prices were steadily rising, the company was losing a lot of money. Skilling turned the company  into cyber space. They attempted to use broadband technology to deliver movies on demand and â€Å"trade weather† like a commodity. Both of the marketing strategies failed miserably. By using mark-to-market accounting they booked 53 million dollar in earnings on a deal that didn’t make a penny. Once they figured out they could not hide the company’s losses, the top executives started selling their stock. Enron was named the â€Å"most admired† corporation by Fortune magazine for the six years in a row. Jim Chanos, an Enron investor, and Bethany McLean, a Fortune reporter, both questioned the company’s financial statements and stock value. McLean tried to talk to Skilling about the irregularities but Skilling went on the defensive calling McLean unethical. Skilling sent three executives to meet with her and Fortune’s editor including CFO Andy Fastow. Andy Fastow was the main one keeping Enron running. He was cooking the books making it look like Enron was making a profit even though the company was more than 30 billion dollars in debt. Fastow created two limited partnerships, LJM1 and LJM2, for the purpose of buying Enron’s poorly performing stocks to improve its financial statements. Fastow had to go before the board of directors to get an exemption to run these two companies as well as Enron. This was a definite conflict of interest. He also had personal financial stake in these company’s either directly or through a partner. He made millions of dollars defrauding Enron. He pressured the investment banks such as Merrill Lynch, Citibank to invest by threatening them with loss of Enron’s bus iness if they did not. He had analysts fired who threatened to report Enron for wrong doings. A good sound ethics policy was established when Enron was formed. The problems occurred when the policy was not followed. By not following the ethics policy put in place, employees and management were encouraged to take risks thereby encouraging unethical behavior which ultimately brought down the company. Enron went bankrupt in 2001 due in large part to widespread fraud in company operating policies. The top executives were the main ones practicing unethical behavior in the company. By the top executives behaving unethically lower level employees followed their example. As long as Enron was making money no one cared how they went about doing it. In 2001, these unethical actions over the past decade and half caught up with Enron’s top executives and employees. Twenty thousand employees lost their job, medical insurance and employees also lost1.2 billion in retirement funds. Enron’s top executives were paid bonuses totaling 55 million and cashed in their stock at approximately 116 million dollars. Even though some of the executives mad e money in the deal they had to face criminal charges which placed some in prison and some still have pending cases. If Enron has survived their collapse in 2001 and I were to be a consultant for Enron, I would make sure that the code of ethics booklet that all employees read and signed before taking the job at Enron were followed. Employees and executives would have to take part in ethics training to be sure that they understand the book completely. Enron would have to have commitment from all of the executive positions to follow these rules and also enforce them even if the unethical actions were making the company more money. There would have to be a zero tolerance rule in place that everyone understood. All employees acting inappropriately would be reprimanded as established in the code of ethics booklet. Work cited Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Dir. Alex Gibney. By Alex Gibney, Peter Elkind, Bethany McLean, and Peter Coyote. Magnolia Pictures, 2005

Leadership Styles Democratic Leadership Style - 1045 Words

DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP STYLE Erica Easley Ohio University Democratic Leadership Style Leaders are the ones we turn to when life gets to be too much. Good leaders set examples and provide guidance through education (Huber, 2014). As a new nurse I can understand how important it is to have a leader you turn to when you are unsure. Furthermore, in the business of health care we are managing people s lives and one wrong move can be deadly. Therefore, it is important to collaborate with other health care professionals to ensure a safe competent method of delivery. Ideally, the role of a leader in health care is one that is knowledgable, firm, and confident, with the ability to deviate from the plan to assist with an emergency. Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to reveal three key behaviors successful leaders exhibit, assess my personal leadership style, referencing theories, while determining an optimal work environment based upon the aforementioned. 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