Business Strategy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

Business Strategy - Essay Example The organization we have selected to compare with Kellogg is General Mills, a manufacturer and marketer of branded consumer foods. General Mills’ mission is nourishing lives. General Mills seeks to attain this mission through making lives healthier, easier and richer (General Mills, 2010). The organization makes lives healthier by continuously improving the health profile of its products. It makes lives easier with foods that are simple to prepare and it makes lives richer by making foods for special moments such as birthdays. Goals and objectives help an organization in controlling its plans and providing its staff with the direction to take for the organization to realize its mission and vision. General Mills has not clearly delineated its vision through a vision statement. However, this can be inferred from the organization’s mission and values statement. Likewise, we can use the values statement to point out General Mills’ goals. From the values statement G eneral Mills aims to assert its values everyday through its people, its brands, its innovation and its performance. These goals are: to ensure that its brands continue to win consumers trust around the world; to nurture diverse, talented, committed people who contribute to their communities; to continue developing and implementing innovative ideas that further build the company’s brands and business; and to continue delivering outstanding performance for its investors. According to Kotelnikov (2011) core competencies are the things that a company does better than its competitors in the critical, central areas of the organization where the most value is added to its products and/or services. For General Mills, its core competencies are in its intimate consumer knowledge and its innovation. These two competencies manifest themselves in in the mix of new products and improvements to existing products that General Mills is renowned. The company extends its legacy of learning ab out products, processes and unique disciplines; improving production efficiencies, elevate quality and reducing costs; and preserving precious institutional memory through its multiple schools such as Cereal School, Yogurt School and Packing School. 1.2 Explain the significance of stakeholder analysis, (especially for the selected organization) (P2) The topic of stakeholders is very popular and contested among theorists. There is quite an amount of contesting literature around which theorists try to update and replace. Freeman, the â€Å"father† of stakeholder theory has also given different definitions of whom or what constitutes a stakeholder. In 1984 Freeman defined stakeholders as â€Å"any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization objectives† while in 2004, Freeman defined stakeholders as â€Å"those groups who are vital to the survival and success of the corporation† (Fontaine, Haarman, & Schmid, 2006). The former definition (Freeman 1984) is preferred in academic circles because it is entirely organization orientated. This is the one we shall use in this discussion. General Mills’ mission is to nourish lives. Nourishing lives refers to nutrition, which as the cliche goes, â€Å"you are what you eat†, is the crux of human health. Furthermore, General Mills is also a Fortune 500 company, among the largest food companies in the world, with a presence in more than 100 countries on six continents. This inter-continental presence implies that General Mil