Business Strategy

Question Number One

The four resources that are the strong part of the General Electric's success include following (Collis and Montgomery, pp. 1):

Large Staff

Strategy consulting boutiques

Huge armies of planners

Extensive portfolio

The reason that is why these resources are considered as significant in achieving competitive advantage is because these resources cannot be adopted or easily be copied by other organizations. General Electric possesses large staff. There are numerous people who serve their abilities at GE. Whenever, the management observes that an employee is not up to the mark then they fire this employee. They have such a huge staff that this activity does not affect them. If they fire an employee they don't have to undertake the process of hiring again as they have enough staff to deal with the work that was under the responsibility of the fired employee. Another resource that GE has is of strategy consulting boutiques. GE has numerous SBU's. So, they need to adopt appropriate strategy in such as way that it would not cause any adverse effect on other businesses of GE. For that purpose, GE utilizes the expertise of the strategists and analysts who properly devise strategies according to the scenario. On the other hand, there are organizations that only rely on their own and single department whose responsibility is to devise strategies for the organization. Just like the strategic boutiques, GE possesses armies of planners. The main responsibility of these people is to plan out different functions and activities of the different departments and different businesses that are running under the umbrella of General Electric. Organizations usually assign the function of planning to the management of each department rather than forming a planning unit that deals with the planning phase of all the SBU's. Extensive portfolio that is the part of the GE's profile is another resource that gives competitive advantage to GE. GE is able to have such an extensive and diverse portfolio because of numbers of years of experience that they possess. For any other organization it is not an easy task to possess and to manage this much diverse portfolio. When any of the SBU does not work or earn profit then they make profit from some other business unit. That is how they remain in a profitable situation.

Question Number Two

There are a number of factors about the policies of the Jack Welch that involve ethical dilemma. The first and foremost practice that can be considered as highly controversial when it comes to practice ethical issues in an organization is that it is the practice of GE that whenever, an employee or a SBU does not perform well then they remove the SBU or fire employee from the organization (Ghillyer, pp. 7). This is not the right practice. When an employee does not perform well then he should be given the chance. He should be trained in such a manner so that he can adopt the suggested practices. If we take into consideration ethical point of views then it can be said that it is the common according to the utilitarianism perspective an action should be taken in such a way that it produce maximum good...