Managing Resources for Competitive Advantage - Coca-Cola Company

Master of Commerce (Management)

Managing Resources for Competitive Advantage

Assignment 1 – A Case Study: The Coca-Cola Company

Submitted by:

Joyce Ann Mayo

Lecturer:

Issac Leung

Term:

July 2012

Date:

18th September 2012

Word Count (Excluding Cover Page, Contents, Executive Summary, Tables, Graphs and Reference List)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

INTRODUCTION

As I researched on Coca-Cola I was struck by the remarkably consistent vision which has permeated it since Co-Cola was first invented by the genius morphine addict Dr. John Pemberton. He considered his drink a something that can extend human life, after his death in 1888, Asa Candler carried on the tradition of fanatical belief on this product.

LITERATURE REVIEW

In this study, the significant role that strategic management delivers to an industry and the level it affects a certain industry or company is observed. Various companies from different industries will be used as examples used throughout the paper to provide in depth understanding of the concepts introduced.

Strategic Management

According to Okmus and Roper (1999), even combining the greatest strategies in the world is worthless if it cannot be implemented and failure in implementing a strategy is as good as failure in formulation. In addition, studies showed that only less than fifty percent of strategies created and formulated get properly implemented (Canella 1989; Mintzberg 1994; Miller 2002). In this case, it can be stated that, it is far better to effectively implement a second grade strategy than to spoil a first rate strategy by ineffective implementation.

Allow this paper to define what strategy is in business perspective, Strategy is defined as a collection of choices and decisions about what the objectives are, what the actions to take are and how to utilize the business’s resources to achieve goals (Jones and George, 2009). Similarly, Ireland, Hoskisson and Hitt (2011) termed strategy as the actions of unified...