Block 1 Term 3 Class details

Day 1

Strategy

Key Takeaways – “It Depends”, “Ask my Analyst”, “That’s a great question, I’d love to hear your thoughts”

Strategy vs Operations – Chess vs Checkers

Know which hill you’re on, you could be at the top of the wrong hill. 

Covered Coors case as Intro to Strategy.

Introduced Porters Five Forces Framework.

Operations

Matching Supply and Demand is the key.  Tradeoffs are essential, you can’t have everything.

Better systems and methods is how you create value in Operations.

How you manage activities creates competitive advantage (link to Strategy).

Covered Dell reading and how they created competitive advantage.

Covered Southwest case as intro to using the recommended Operations case study framework. 

Teams @ Haas

Each team had dedicated time again with a team coach to work through feedback from the last team survey.  There may have also been some free time for team bonding at a local watering hole.

Day 2

Strategy

Rivalry – ways out include;

-       Co-ordination (e.g. Oil industry)

-       Switching costs (e.g. Printer Cartridges)

-       Differentiation (Horizontal vs Vertical)

Covered Airline case and application of Porters Five Forces

Operations

Introduced Little’s Law (I=R x T)

Used Netflix case to demonstrate use of Little’s Law

Introduced Rate and Capacity

Used Kirsten’s cookies case to demonstrate use of Rate and Capacity

Creating Effective Organizations

Operating in a VUCA world

Focus on understanding organizations Past, Present, Future

Managing globalization and culture.

Team project – will focus on how Gen AI is changing the way a company operates and organizes. 

Day 3

Operations

Introduced Time and Variability (CVa and CVp).  How to calculate wait times and utilizations (p/a).

Key takeaway – wait times depend on variability, not on utilization.  You can expand capacity and still have wait times. 

Creating Effective Organizations

Continued discussions on organizations, disruptions such as AI and how to gain alignment vs consensus in ever changing organizations and evolving and growing groups of stakeholders. 

Strategy

Walmart case.  Walmart is a tech company, like many other nontraditional tech companies.  Used a hub and spoke distribution model. 

Strategy formation – matching external needs with the internal skillsets you have.

Sometimes the right thing is for a company to close/come to an end.

Understand positioning may differ by location as you globalize – e.g. Walmart in China is considered high end.