Interconnectivity Of Business Subjects For Effective Management Practice

1. Select four subjects that you have completed in your MBA. These can be from unrelated disciplines or from the same discipline.

2. Critically analyse these subjects and demonstrate how they interconnect to solve business problems and promote effective management practice. You will offer examples of the theoretical, practical, applied and reflective skills you learnt .

3. Identify theories you have learnt in your chosen subjects and discuss how they can be used in analysis and the solving of business problems.

4. Reflect on how your level of understanding of both the subjects and the theoretical models has developed an advanced level of knowledge for you as an effective manager.  

Business subjects studied and their association

Reflective writing is one of the most important medium in the learning process of students. Researchers often say that it is an integral component of education as it helps in assisting students to construct meaning from their learning experiences. This gives scope to students to actively think about the knowledge and skills they would be utilizing in their future careers rather than being simply passive participants of learning. This assignment will mainly portray how the different subjects learnt in class would be helpful in the future career and how the different subjects are interconnected in nature. It will also show how it will help me to get over challenges in future in my future professions.

While attending the lectures provided in the course study, I came to learn about four important subjects. This helped me in developing an extensive knowledge about how to handle business internationally. The first subject which I learnt was international strategy. These strategies mainly helps would be managers to develop ideas about plans which are helpful in guiding commercial transactions taking place between various entities among different overseas countries. International business strategy mainly helps in developing plans and actions of mainly different private organizations in order to increase profits (Grnat 2016). I believe that learning this topic would be extremely helpful for me if I am placed as manager of a multinational company. This subject would be helping me in understanding the increased market size and also help me in greater returns on major capital investments. This also helps in knowing the investments in new products and processes with developing more knowledge on greater economies of scale, scope and learning. This also helps to know about the competitive advantage through location like for example accessing to low cost, labour, critical resources and customers (Nagle, Hogan and Zale 2016). The other subject which is found to be extremely interrelated with this is the cultural intelligence as well as ethics. While conducting business with international companies or with other branches of the same companies overseas, it becomes very important for the employees to develop cultural intelligence (Covin and Miller 2014). Cultural intelligence mainly would help the employees to learn and respect each other’s culture and communicate overseas keeping in mind the cultural preferences and inhibitions. This prevents cultural conflicts and ensures higher productivity (Wood and Peters 2014). If I am working as a manager in a multinational company I might have to handle a team which would be consisting of people from diverse backgrounds and in such a scenario, cultural intelligence would be helpful for me to learn and respect all cultural values and traditions. Moreover, researchers say that such teams provide innovative and creative solutions that help in overcoming barriers as different people with different backgrounds have different working ideas and styles and different thinking power. Emotional intelligence would be helpful for me to motivate the employees not only in my own teams but also the employees in branches working overseas. Empathy and social skills of emotional intelligence would be helpful when I would be interacting with any international companies for increasing our organization on global boundaries or during merging with new companies. Therefore, one thing can be noted here that international strategies can only be applied successfully when a manager has proper cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence. While handling such international assignments applying international strategies and concentrating on the overall expansion of the business, it becomes important to be very careful in the constantly changing business environment. Dynamic strategies are required by managers according to me as I believe that this is the ability to modify and thereby implement new strategies quickly in many adverse situations in business. Economic pressures, modifications and changes in the industry, change in consumer preferences and regulatory pressures all impacts ability of the business to sell its products and services. Therefore, it is very important for the managers to be always being up to toes and be quick and witty to keep up with the alterations and propose plans which will ensure that the strategies would help to respond appropriately to the modifications and changes which can indeed acting as potential opportunities and new threats to its operations. However, I should keep one thing is mind always that any of my decisions and activities would never be without any ethics. This is the study of proper business policies regarding potentially controversial issues like corporate governances, insider trading, discrimination, bribery and many others (Mason and Simmons 2014). One of the most important ethics which I personally believe is essential for all companies and also would be tried by me is corporate social responsibility. I believe business ethics, besides law; provide an important frame work for all organizations to follow and gain public acceptance and therefore ethics should be followed by me in each of my endeavours.

Theories applied

International strategy which is learnt by me from my academic courses shows it to be comprising of three important theories which are applied in three different situations. I believe that a manager has to be efficient in understanding which theory to apply when developing the strategy and profit margin of the company. The multi-domestic strategy mainly helps in maximizing the local responsiveness by handing over and decentralizing the decision making authority to local business units in each of the countries (Schiavone 2016). This is mainly done so that they can create products or services optimized for local markets. One example that I have found very interesting is where MC.Donald has tried out Indian spices in its food products for maintaining their market in India which gives it a very regional twist to the otherwise western food style. This has been done by the branches of the McDonald of India only. Another is the Global strategy which is centralized and controlled by main home branch seeking global efficiency (Hemingway and Priestly 2014). Here products are more made to be standardized rather than tailoring them to local markets. Another strategy is the transnational strategy which needs to combines both the multi-domestic as well as the global strategy to get both the local effectiveness and global efficiency (Roh, Hong and Min 2014). I believe when I will be placed in the managerial position, this knowledge will be extremely helpful for me in analyzing the strategies according to the requirements of the market in that country and henceforth develop projects accordingly. On the other hand, dynamic strategies need to be properly planned and important steps which are to be taken. The first one is achieving alignment which is bringing the different parts of the organization into an interrelated model. Next is agility which is the ability to respond quickly to external conditions and challenging the present strategy constantly. The next is employee buy in where the strategy to the employee is to be communicated (Wilden et al. 2013). This is followed by having clear accountabilities for each strategy at every level of the organization where each individual clarifies their objectives and accelerates the pace of decision making. This is followed by creating strategy knowledge database which allow for steeper learning curve for new starters encouraging knowledge sharing. It has seen that each of the steps had helped me by acting as a guideline (Nonaka et al. 2014). If I follow the guidelines properly I would be successfully bale to incorporate the dynamic strategies effectively. From the entire course on dynamic strategy I believe that main three steps which I should keep in mind while planning and implementing strategies to cut out the competition are translating strategy, adapting the strategy and sustaining the strategy. Again certain theories need to be included. These are utilitarianism, rights, justice as well as egoism. Utilitarianism is one of the theories maintained as business ethics where the individual should first examine the effect of the action in order to decide whether it is morally correct or not. The action would be considered to be morally correct if the total net benefits of the action are exceeding the total net benefit of any other action. For example, if I become a manager of a manufacturing company I should have the ethics to make sure that the waste products which are produced by the organization are not as much as the benefits that the manufactured products bring to the lives of the people. Another ethics is the rights of the person which mainly involves allowing the person to freely pursue certain actions without the interference from others. This might involve legal rights which gets defined by a system of laws and then comes the moral rights which are based on ethical standards (Yitmen 2013). I, as a manager will try to respect the rights of the others and consider all employees as equals. These would ensure satisfaction among the different employees as they would believe that the company is providing them freedom to perform by themselves and allowing them to conduct work according to their own comfortable zones. For example, I can allow them for free speech if they want to suggest any options without interrupting them as it is their moral right to speak for themselves or for the betterment of the company. Moreover justice is yet another ethics where equal treatment and care would be provided to everyone irrespective of their power, position and others. It mainly helps in looking at the balance of benefits and burdens which mainly gets distributed among the working members. Two forms of egoism can also be stated in ethics such as individual and universal (Mason and Simmons 2014). The former mainly judges actions by their efforts on one’s interest and the other is the universal egoism which considers interests of the others when assessing actions. I believe applying these ethics while developing dynamic strategies for business and considering cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence as primary tools during implementation of international strategy would help me develop as manager capable in working in global organizations.

I have been extremely fortunate to learn some of the most important subjects in my academic courses. These are extremely important for any manager who is expecting to be working on the global environment. In order to make a multinational company survive in the cut throat competition, it becomes extremely important for the managers to work very systematically so that all the aspects of conducting international business can be looked over. The most important aspect of such overseas business is adopting the best international strategy. This is important in first establishing the business plans and thereby working out to implement them successfully after taking a thorough analysis of the overseas market and demands of the product or services which are to be sold. Different products or services require different types of international strategy to be successful in capturing g the attention of customer and therefore the three types of international strategy would help in properly knowing how to correctly plan and implement ways so that the products rightly catches the eyes of the consumers and makes good profit. While doing so, it might happen that the company is facing severe competition due to a new entrant in the business and is in need to immediately change the international strategy they were using to conduct the business. In such a situation, dynamic strategy would be extremely helpful as it would help in analysing the new adverse situation and performing the important steps with an alternate new strategy. This would be helping the organization to emerge out a new counter strategy that would help the organization to meet its goals and objectives. However, besides these strategic aspects, certain administrative aspects also need to be considered by me as a manager. I need to have cultural and emotional intelligence, where with my proper social skills and empathy, I can crack many interesting overseas deals. In many cases, I may need to interact with business heads of other organizations that are form different cultural backgrounds. Also my own teams may comprise of different people with different culture and races. Cultural intelligence would help me to correctly communicate with them with proper verbal and nonverbal skills maintaining their cultural preferences and inhibitions (Di-Sefano et al. 2014). These result in development of strong bonds where people feel respected and these increase productivity. Properly managing teams with correct ethics like maintaining justice, right, egoism and utilitarianism would help me to conduct my job with dignity and accountability ensuring that I proper manager my team effectively making each member satisfied and happy and preventing them from developing job stress and negative feelings.

Conclusion:

This reflection had helped me to understand how different subjects are interconnected among themselves in the business domains. This assignment had helped me evolve my knowledge as a would-be manager for my future prospects. I have found that the subjects had helped me gather in-depth knowledge about working in a global organization. It had helped me to understand how successful endeavours can be undertaken from the position of a manager in a multinational company. I will apply the models and theories effectively in order to overcome any challenge and ensure a successful smooth flow of work.  

References:

Covin, J.G. and Miller, D., 2014. International entrepreneurial orientation: Conceptual considerations, research themes, measurement issues, and future research directions. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 38(1), pp.11-44.

Di Stefano, G., Peteraf, M. and Verona, G., 2014. The organizational drivetrain: A road to integration of dynamic capabilities research. The Academy of Management Perspectives, 28(4), pp.307-327.

Grant, R.M., 2016. Contemporary Strategy Analysis Text Only. John Wiley & Sons.

Hemingway, L. and Priestley, M., 2014. Natural hazards, human vulnerability and disabling societies: a disaster for disabled people?. Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal, 2(3).

Mason, C. and Simmons, J., 2014. Embedding corporate social responsibility in corporate governance: A stakeholder systems approach. Journal of Business Ethics, 119(1), pp.77-86.

Nagle, T.T., Hogan, J. and Zale, J., 2016. The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing: New International Edition. Routledge.

Nonaka, I., Kodama, M., Hirose, A. and Kohlbacher, F., 2014. Dynamic fractal organizations for promoting knowledge-based transformation–A new paradigm for organizational theory. European Management Journal, 32(1), pp.137-146.

Roh, J., Hong, P. and Min, H., 2014. Implementation of a responsive supply chain strategy in global complexity: The case of manufacturing firms. International Journal of Production Economics, 147, pp.198-210.

Schiavone, G., 2016. International organizations: a dictionary and directory. Springer.

Wilden, R., Gudergan, S.P., Nielsen, B.B. and Lings, I., 2013. Dynamic capabilities and performance: strategy, structure and environment. Long Range Planning, 46(1), pp.72-96.

Wood, E.D. and St. Peters, H.Y., 2014. Short-term cross-cultural study tours: impact on cultural intelligence. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 25(4), pp.558-570.

Yitmen, I., 2013. Organizational cultural intelligence: A competitive capability for strategic alliances in the international construction industry. Project Management Journal, 44(4), pp.5-25.