Senior Workers Article

The article “seniors at a senor level” talks about how many seniors citizens are continuously working even thought they are over the normal retirement age of 65. Barney’s four questions about assessing a firms strength can be used to see if having workers over the age of 65 is beneficial, I will use Dana Cable as an example

The question of value: Because of the vast experience he has I think Cable is considered to be an important resources because he can aid it in grasping new opportunities and avoid threats.
The question of rareness: Currently there are not many people over 65 who are continuing to work, but it’s becoming a trend
The question of limitability: I think it will be very difficult for a firm to force their best employees who are 65 to continue working since most of them will want to retire.
The question of organization: I think firms with such senior workers will benefit from them because they are experienced and know how to and probably are exploiting the firms resources, otherwise I don’t think they will stay in a company that’s failing.

In my opinion firms with such senior workers might have a sustained competitive advantage in there personnel departments this is because such workers are valuable (due to their experiences and knowledge), rare (since many workers retire after 65), and difficult to imitate (this is in the sense that a company cannot force a worker to continue working for a firm even if that person if successful and experienced).

Danish Boycott

The article about the boycott of Danish products can be related to both the Hamel and Porter articles. From Porter’s point of view the article shows the buying power that consumers have, in this case the boycotting of Danish products. They had power to do this because the products bought from Denmark are mostly dairy ones and so are indifferent and standard, which means that they are easily substituted. I don’t think that the switching costs for the buyers are much this is because there are lots of local companies that sell similar products. Also Saudi Arabia and many other countries in the Middle East are boycotting Danish products which mean that combined together they buy a large amount of Danish products. This gives them a certain power because the Middle East forms large part of the market they operate in and so this might cause the Danish companies to ask their government to give an apology.

Some of the elements of Hamel’s business concept innovations that can be applied here are customer interface and Value network. Under the customer interface the element that we can apply is the information and insight, this is because the stores got information that people are planning to boycott and so they removed the Danish products from their shelves so they don’t loose customers. In the value network we can apply the coalition elements, this is true because the stores decided to join together and boycott Danish products until they receive an official apology from the government.

Google in China

In The first article “The Real Cost of Google’s Sellout” the main issue is how Google first refused to aid the US government in enforcing the online pornography legislation by stating that the privacy of their users is very important to them. The second issue is how Google managed to contradict them selves by saying that they will aid the Chinese government in banning access to thousands of websites, or anything that the government feels opposes their beliefs. This situation is related to Porter’s five forces in that Google faced a barrier to entry (in this case government regulation) and decided to overcome it by succumbing to their demands. The strange thing is that they rejected to aid the US government because they want to protect their users and then they go and accept an offer to prevent future users from accessing the materials they want. This could be since they are already established in the US, but in china they will do anything to gain the market even if it means sacrificing their customer’s freedom and privacy. Google’s mission as stated on their website is “Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” (www.google.com/corporate/) if Google decides to go ahead and operate in china I think they should change their business mission, because they are basically lying to themselves and most importantly their users. And the business mission is one of Hamel’s Core strategies to succeed, if a company can’t stick to it and keeps changing its values people will begin to think the company is just interested in profit.