Reflect critically on the following statement: ‘progressive, innovative enterprises do not react or respond to trends, they establish them. So environmental scanning is of limited strategic value to such enterprises.’
What will be an ideal response?
It is true that innovative enterprises such as Apple Computer and Dyson work hard to create new
products that consumers did not know they needed or would find attractive. Thus they create markets
and new industry sectors in which competitors are disadvantaged and reactive. Do such enterprises
do no scanning? Almost certainly they do, but they generally focus on the variables that are
perceived as relevant to their circumstances and open to objective measurement and forecasting e.g.
GDP per capita (disposable income); availability of support infrastructures (e.g. electronics firms
target clienteles having access to good electricity, internet and telephone networks). The evidence is
that large corporations (defence contractors are a recent example) get wrong-footed by events they
did not anticipate or (more likely) knew of, but could do little to affect (e.g. government cuts on
defence equipment expenditure). Progressive enterprises must, of course, take care to innovate at a
pace their clienteles can accept and afford, yet retain adequate sensitivity and flexibility to adapt to
the unforeseen.
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A) Intense B) Intuitive C) Inspiring D) Impulsive
The purpose of most business reports is to A) present data
B) answer questions. C) solve problems. D) All answer choices provide purposes for business reports.
Controls are not designed to provide assurance that:
A. The recorded accountability for assets is compared with the existing assets at reasonable intervals. B. Access to assets is permitted only in accordance with management's authorization. C. Fraud will be eliminated. D. Transactions are executed in accordance with management's authorization.
In Microsoft Excel, a logical function that returns one value if the condition is true and another if the condition is false, is ________
A) OR(condition 1, condition 2 . . .) B) IF(condition, value if true, value if false) C) VLOOKUP(value, table range, column number) D) AND(condition 1, condition 2…)