Phases of Internationalization That Occurred After Vechtel Took over the French Company - Assignment Example

1. The three phases of internationalization that occurred after Vechtel took over the French company Change of the company name from Brasseries unions to Brasseries Vechtel. Change in whatever environment is very important because it is one of the inevitable factors. According to Thompson& Martin (2005), technology is changing, meaning the company too needs to embrace changes in the ways in which they have been operating. Some cultural practices in the company must be done away with other needs to be maintained or improved but most important also new ones must be utilized too. The change of name was basically for the purpose of ownership. Change of the work force was the next thing that was done in the company. This is because there are a number of issues that arise due to the employee management relationship. The perception could be positive or negative. This means that the attitude that the management as well as the styles of management that the managers uses will greatly contribute to the output of the employees in the school. There are three ways in which this will affect (Chandler, 1992). It is very important for the management to recognize the human resource in the school, the importance of knowledge management and the importance of motivation and reward systems in the school. Human resource management is one of the most important activities as far as the success of any company is concerned. Creating market share though brand management. Brand management refers to the process of applying marketing techniques with reference to specific product, brand, and product line (Salder & Craig, 2003). The process not only entails the issue of the brand but also the management of the particular company to ensure the company gets to achieve all of its objectives and goals. There was a need for this particular company to get to understand what brand means for them before being engaged in integrated brand management. Therefore, the owner or the manager of the company is expected to explain what the brand means for the company (Susan, 2002). This means that the managers in conjunction with the other employees especially the marketing department should be involved in the process of branding after getting to know the needs of the customers that are out to satisfy. The company’s CEO should lead the exercise. It should be noted that for a particular brand to be effective to the customers then it means that there must be a brand promise, which stands for the real implications of the brand (Rik, 2003). 2. The extent to which stereotype is evident in the words and thoughts of Jean-Pierre Courbet and Jaap Harmelen Jean peer before he stared the meeting with Harmelen was of the idea that the fact that the team of managers were sent off it was something that was expected. According to him, this was like selling a very valuable asset in the company, which was the key to a strong competitive ground. He also felt that its was one of the mistake the company had committed because by letting go of the managers was like getting rid of the company’s network hence losing its market share. On the other hand, Harmelen felt that this should not have happened because the company had a broad wide range of beer brands. Pierre was of the opinion that it was not enough to have a range wide of beer considering the fact that they did nothing about the local brands. Harmelen line of thinking was diversified by the fact that according to him, he felt they approach taken by the company was wrong. The company simply did not understand the country it was operating under. This explains why he felt that they took the wrong approach of things. Jean supported Him on that because he also felt that they lacked knowledge about the Spanish management team. The management could not speak or communicate Spanish or even run things the Spanish way and that could have been the source of their failure. He felt that it would have been important for them to understand the culture of the Spanish people to be able to cope something even Harmelen agreed with him (Earl, 2001). The two also felt an upper hand as they take over the company because they feel the employees and the people around have faith and trust in them. 3. Culture classification: The effect each culture of the protagonist (Courbet, Harmelen)had on the success of the takeover by the Vechtel of the French company Culture has numerous definitions presented by different authors based on their environments and contents (Barney, 2006). According to Hofstede’s an influential Dutch sociologist, there are five dimensions of culture. Large verse as small distance power: How well the less powerful people in the organization agree the distribution of power is equal. Collectiveness verse as individualism: collectiveness being the issue of people being defined and acting as members of an established group like a religion and family while individualism being the definition of an individual as per their own characters. Femininity and masculinity: this is with reference to the value that was traditionally places on females and males in terms of wealth, roles and quality of their life. Strong verse as weak uncertainty avoidance: The numbers of people in a given society who are very conscious about unknown, which also affect the employees work because the ones very strong with uncertainty tend to change their employees. Short-term verse as long-term orientation: the long terms oriented people tend value their attitudes and actions that may affect their society while the short term oriented do not care much. Culture is therefore, defined differently in Middle Easter countries (e.g. embracing collectivism) while in the Western countries individualism is championed; generally, culture consist of complex ways of thinking, reacting and feeling, that are acquired and transmitted by embodiment in artefacts, symbols, or ideas that are attached to values. Cross culture is a subject that in the literature appears to bring in divergent views such exchange of greetings, gender based activities, and perception towards business (Harris, 2004). 4. Culture of the companies that are concerned. The strategies of Vechtel (Rotterdam HQ) and the Brasseries Vechtel Lyons with regard to internationalization. The similarities and differences Investor in People refers to one of the management tools used in the achievement of the best management. The framework has three Principles. Planning involves the development of the strategies that will be used in the improvement of the performance of the organization in terms of the objectives and goals. The planning skill means that the manager must be able to have the objectives, the mission, the vision, the core values the strategies the resources and the budget of the organization with him and all must be operational. He also needs to be able to apply the eight steps of planning in the organization or the business (Finlay, 2000). The plan that is done for the organization must also have very SMART strategies and objectives meaning they should be very specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound. The second principle involves do, meaning the implementation stage of the strategies, vision, mission and the objectives, finally the principle of reviewing. Reviewing entails the process of evaluation as well adjustment of the strategies. The three principles also involve ten indicators that are used of which each of the indicators is further sub-divided into a number of requirements, which are thirty-nine in total. This is one of the most effective investment tools for any organization as well as businesses. It is aimed at the advancement of the organizations performances through their employees. It is very helpful to the organization in the achievement of the objectives as well as in the development of the human resource of the organization. One of the main standards of the tool is the three principles of which each organization must subscribe to and has some indicators, which must be the organizations key target. It provides a very flexible kind of framework for use by the organization (Black, 2003). It is also very helpful in the process of mirroring the organization’s plan cycle ensuring that it is very clear as well as easy for it to follow and implement the plan that has been put forth for the organization. It also enables the organization to have strategies which improves the performance of the organization, ensures that process of learning as well development is very well planned, it also ensures that the strategies that are made for the management of human resource promotes equality. It helps the managers to be effective and efficient in their management and leadership skills, the people are also involved in the management of the organization and finally the investment in the people is geared towards the improvement of the organizations performance (Hannagan, 2004). 5. The way the culture concerned behave in a cross-cultural situation a. How the 2 internationalization strategies in 4 reconcile Many organizations are failing in their service delivery because they have a very weak organizational culture, which makes them lack a sense of direction. These refers to all the practices as well as policies that the management of an organization uses to design the work as well as select develop and train, motivate, appraise and control the employees in the organization (Mullins, 2005). There are three models of namely the control based, resource based and then an intergraded model, which combines the first two. Control based type of model involved in the strategic management of the human resource globally, entails the ways in which the management tries to control as well as monitor the role of the employees in the performance of the organization. It is very important for any management to be able to control the behaviours of the employees in the organization because if they cannot then it means the achievement of the organization’s goals and objectives may not be reached. This means that any organization must be in a position to transform its labour power into labour itself (Gottschalk, 2005). This will be done through ensuring that all the employees that are hired have the capacity to do the work. This will be done by organizing space, task, time and movement within the operations of the workers. In addition, it is very important for the management to understand that all of the workers have very different needs in term of space, time, rewards, job security and their capacity to work (Hill & Jones, 2000). The workers behaviour enables the management to be able to control the operations of the organization meaning that proper management of the human resource will enable them to understand the workers behaviours hence proper strategic management. Resource based model entails reward efforts through the process of managers viewing their employees as the organizations assets. b. How the two companies arrived to a common goal despite the differences in their respective national cultures Apart from the organizations focusing on competition with their rivals, it is also very important for it to think beyond the existence problems and try to improve the company’s ways of operations by ensuring that the employees are getting the knowledge they need especially on what is happening in the market at that particular point (Mullins, 2005). This is where the issue of knowledge management comes in. There are a number of advantages of sharing knowledge in an organization as a way of managing the human resource, which are as follows. It leads to improved level of creativity at a personal level hence leading to the creation of a room for innovation It leads the organization to a point of realizing economy of scale and so lowering the production costs. It ensures the company maintains consistency in terms of the quality of its services and products. It also enables the organization or the organization repeating the mistakes it had committed. Improves responsiveness in terms of competition Improves the organization’s process of decision making 6. Conclusion: could the internationalization improve in any way a. What needs to be done to make brassieres Vechtel/Vechtel (Rotterdam) more international Products recovery can be done. Products expert analyses acknowledge that any terrible ending often dominate the recollection of the experience of a person. In most cases, customers do not notice how long it takes the service/product to be delivered when they are engaged mentally and hence service marketers often take advantage of this to engage their customers mentally. Furthermore, more often than not customers desperately want to make sense out of unexpected events. The service encounters should therefore be studied from the customer’s point of view. Marketers should finish strongly, ensure they get the bad experience out of the way early, segment the pleasure, combine the pain and build commitment via choice and offer people rituals and stick to them. On the other hand, service recovery ensures that angry customers are assuaged through well-intentioned, apt, and prompt recovery (Hamel & Prahalad, 1994). This requires that all stakeholders at the firm have the motivation, skill and authority to make service recovery to be the main component of service operation. In order to attain high service standards the service delivery system need to be production oriented. b. Could the first phase been shortened or improved No. Good culture in an organization are basically characterized by values and norms that supports excellence, profitability, teamwork, customer services that is well oriented, honesty, commitment and pride in an individuals work. The management must also be very adaptive and ready to work hard to survive in the competitive world through improvisation of new technologies which are very innovative for the purpose of coming up with new strains of growth. In order for the organization to attract and keep the customers there must be a culture of peaceful coexistence amongst the employees, management and the stakeholders. There is clear and well defined equity in the manner in which the customers will be handled (Cummings & Christopher, 2005). This is because if an organization treats some of its customers better than other then it means it may lose its customers on the ground that some will feel neglected. There should be mature use of the moral judgment in any decision that the organization will undertake. The organization culture will be used as one of the managerial tools in the organization. The challenge in the use of this tool is that many managers do not understand whether the managers should use management to control the culture or to adapt to the culture. The organization will use the management simply as a symbol of action in the sense that the shared understandings will be the source of managerial accomplishment (Peter, 2007). c. Could the take over of Schaeffer have been realized in a better way Through the promotion of the products and the new brands that were introduced in the company. Promotion is the mode used by marketers to describe the product or the service to potential customers. Promotion may be mass selling, sales promotion, or personal selling. Mass selling involves advertising which a firm pays for or publicity, which is free of charge. Sales promotion entails things that marketers do to get the consumers to try the service or the product or coupons, contests and free samples. Price refers to how much the firm charge for its product or service (Cummings, 2005). Marketers use pricing when the price for their product or service is lower than that of competitors (Robyn, 2007). High priced products fetch more profits but are hard to maintain especially where there are more competitors or where the product or service quality is compromised. Thus pricing of products or services is dependent on the value the product or the service renders to the consumer. The price of services or products can be determined through various means such as cost plus, value based, competitive, going rate, skimming, discount, loss leader or psychological based. d. Which element in the cultural level do you consider to be the most influential in the success of takeover such as those described here Human resource management in the sense that one need to mingle with the employees as well as motivate them like the strategy of Harmelen and Pierre was. The employees need to feel appreciated as well as needed in the company. By doing so, each of them will be working hard to make positive contributions to the company and to ensure that the company is doing well this in turn will be an advantage to the company in form of output improvement as well as market share (Grant, 1991). Reference Barney, J. 2006. Organizational Culture: Can It Be a Source of Sustained Competitive Advantage? Academy of Management Review, vol. 11, no. 3, p. 656-665. Black, R. 2003. Organizational Culture: Creating the Influence Needed for Strategic Success. London: John Wiley and Sons. Chandler, B. 1992. Management theory and practice. London: Thomson. Cummings, N. 2005. Work Groups, Structural Diversity, and Knowledge Sharing in Global Organization, Management Science, vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 352 – 364. Cummings, T. & Christopher, W.2005. Organization Development and Change, 8th Ed. New York: Thomson South-Western. Earl, M. 2001. Knowledge management strategies: Toward a taxonomy. Journal of Management Information Systems, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 215-233. Finlay, P. 2000. Strategic management: an introduction to business and corporate strategy. New York: Pearson Education. Gottschalk, P. 2005. Strategic knowledge management technology. Chicago: Idea Group Publishing Grant, R. 1991. The resource-based theory of competitive advantage: implications for strategy formulation, California Management Review, vol. 33 no. 3, pp. 114 – 135. Hamel, G. and Prahalad, C. 1994. Competing for the future. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Hannagan, M. 2004. Management concepts and practice. London: Prentice hall.  Harris, S. 2004. Organizational Culture and Individual Sensemaking: A Schema-Based Perspective. Organization Science, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 309–321. Hill, C., & Jones, G. 2007. Strategic Management: An Integrated Approach, 8th Ed. California: Cengage Learning. Mullins, L. 2005. Management and Organizational Behaviour. New York: FT Prentice Hall. Peter, F. 2007. The practice of management. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Rik, R. 2003. Brand Management. Essex: Pearson Education Limited. Robyn, B. 2007. Integrated marketing communication: creative strategy from idea to implementation. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Salder, P. & Craig, J.2003. Strategic management, 2nd Ed. London: Kogan Page Publishers. Susan, B. 2002. Rapid strategic planning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, J. & Martin, F. 2005. Strategic management: awareness and change, 5th Ed. California: Cengage Learning EMEA. Read More