What To Do, What To Do...

I was getting ready for the winery case.  Sean had sent out the bullet points (based on a team meeting we had on Tuesday night) late last night and asked for some help on a couple of questions.  On the bus to work this morning, I reviewed the case and flipped through two of our readings.  I really liked this table on Testing the Quality of Your Strategy found in Hambrick & Frederickson's "Are You Sure You Have a Strategy?" (Academy of Management Executive, 2001, Vol. 15, No. 4.).  It made you ask questions like:

1. Does your strategy fit with what's going on in the environment?
2. Does your strategy exploit your key resources?
3. Will your envisioned differentiators be sustainable?
4. Are the elements of your strategy internally consistent?
5. Do you have enough resources to pursue this strategy?
6. Is your strategy implementable?

Not all the questions were relevant to the winery case, which has many HR-related issues as well as some strategy issues.  I thought it was a good reality check-list, though.  (There are sub-questions for each of the 6 questions listed above.)

Then I went through "Looking Inside for Competitive Advantage" (Academy of Management Executive, 1995, Vol. 9. No. 4).  That's where I found the elusive VRIO framework that was mentioned in class, but it seems none of us (on the team) had taken any notes on...  So, for the record, VRIO is short for:

Value
Rareness
Imitability
Organization

This framework is actually quite useful for the winery case study.  They produce high quality wine, limited batches (just try to find the 1999 Merlot), they are hard to imitate, and their organization, to use the vernacular, sucks.

[Michael, if you are reading this, I was sorely tempted to issue a WOTD when my Global Business Environment prof actually said "... to use the vernacular, 'sucks'"... but was too busy taking notes.  It was a fast-paced class.  So, I used it here.]

I was starting my VRIO analysis on the case study and did a quick email check and found that Sean had gone ahead and put the bullet points into paragraphs.  We are now over the page limit so he doesn't need any extra input at this time.

Now I need to figure out what to do.  Obviously, I decided to do a blog entry.  For the rest of the evening, I think I'll finalize my planning on catching up on my reading.  There is so much to read that I have started an Excel spreadsheet with target dates for each one.  I figure I'll be in a good place if I can get my pre-work done for class weekend (4 hours of Financial Planning & Analysis; 8 hours of Global Business Environment) and get two readings done each day for the rest of the classes.