COMM5010
Sustainable Competitive Advantage
Week 3
Greta Sharples g.sharples@unsw.edu.au
Sustainable Competitive Advantage – Resource
Based View
How do people make the difference?
• Why are people so important to your business
• Products can be imitated
• Last year’s innovation quickly become the norm
• Creating a culture of people who deliver your product differently
quickly becomes your sustainable competitive advantage
What sort of people do you want and need?
• War for talent
• Only the best people
Who ever wrote this on their resume?
• Disinterested, slow working hates customers?
• So resumes all look the same, referees look the same, how do
we really know what sort of person you are?
• How does a business decide?
How does a business decide?
• What is best at Optus might not fit at Telstra
• What works at Price Waterhouse Coopers, may not at
EYCAPGemini
• Comm Bank and Westpac
• Coles and Woolworths
• 100% Yum and McDonalds
• Mercedes and Hyundai
Organisational Strategy
• Resource-based view is that people make the difference
• Remember management is about the right product (and
quality) and the right price
Are all workers equal?
Are more strategically significant
• Does this equally apply to everyone in the business? Should
it?
• Who in a business is really creating the advantage today and
tomorrow?
• Are all people making your business strategically competitive?
• The resource-based view looks at people as the point of
difference but how this is enacted is important
Best Practices
Must look at how to hire and who
• Articulate your positioning strategy and desired
organizational capabilities
• How specifically does your organization want to be
positioned? Consider does McDonald’s need the same type of
people as a five-star restaurant?
• Start by determining the role
• This is not person specific but role specific as to how the role creates
or maintains strategic competitive advantage
Identify key work groups
• Workforce segmentation analysis
• Identify the major workforce groups/segments within the business
• R&D, manufacturing, knowledge workers, customer facing, back-office
(processing, accounting), service providers (IT, finance)
• Assess each groups’ contribution and skills
• By Uniqueness and by strategic centrality
Remember your key resources are high high
Low HighStrategic Centrality
Highly unique skills are not readily bought or built
Highly central roles deliver on all or most an organization’s strategic
capabilities
**Improving strategic skills increases organizational effectiveness**
A lot of ‘Yes’ responses indicate that the group has highly unique skills
What does this mean for you?
• Is your role strategically important or is it more a support to the
strategy?
• How will you use this when you are being recruited?
• What does it mean for how your (future) organisation may
view education opportunities, advancement or other benefits?
Where are you at
• S
• T
• O
• P
Flexible firm model
(Atkinson 1984)
Core and periphery workers
• Why do we need functional flexibility?
• Why are outsourcing, subcontracting, self employment and
agency/temp work important to understand?
• Psychological contract is part of how we all work, and
important in creating the types of behaviour we seek
Key Takeaways
• Strategic people management involves identifying and
delivering skills which will achieve desired organisational
capabilities and your positioning strategy
• Effective, strategic, people management is best done by both
HR and business managers
• Different workforce segments need different people
management practices
• Focus on the role not the person in the role, the understand
the type of person needed for that role and the organisation
Today will impact your final assignments
• You will need to show what will make them strategically
sustainable
• What gaps they may have within their personnel
• May also be useful as part of assignment 2
Reminders
• Assignment is due on Friday
• Make sure you identify a specific company, then show how
megatrend/s and drivers are impacting.
• Consider what it needs to do for the future to be competitive (
it must ‘stick to its knitting’)
• What do you see as their current strategy and how might this
be impacted
• Do not choose a government or sector as your organisation –
it's too big for this project
Get started in your groups before next week
• The wikis will open on Friday
• Now is the time to get your research down, look to write a brief
on the company and what it does – this should show that you
understood the video as presented by the client.
• The next step will be to analyse its strategy, the drivers and
megatrends impacting it