Apple, Inc

Strategic Human Resource Management Case Analysis: Apple Inc.

Strategic management is a five stage process that is crucial to the success of a business. The first stage of strategic management process is for the business to evaluate or develop a mission statement. All businesses will have some sort of mission statement that basically describes the businesses purpose. The mission statement is basically just a couple of sentences that let everyone know the reason their business and their goals. (Mello, 2011)

Apple's mission statement according to its investor’s webpage states that it builds the best personal computer in the world along with professional software. It also states their defining the future of mobile media and computing devices. (Investor Relations, 2012)

The second stage of the strategic management process is the analysis of environment. Once a company or business has developed its mission statement they must analyze the environment in which it exists. This analysis must incorporate the negative and positive influences that will be placed on the business from the external environment. The key factors that will influence this evaluation are industry structure, government regulations, technology, market, and the economic trends. (Mello, 2011)

Apple Inc. identified the key players that were in competition with in the PC market as: Acer, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Fujitsu, IBM, Packard Bell and Compaq. Apple also partnered with some of its competitors as we see in 1991 with IBM in a joint venture to develop a new operating system and applications. In 1997 Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple. This became critical to Apple's turnaround under leadership of Steve Jobs. In an effort to change the direction of the company Apple would change CEOs and managers over the years to increase revenue, production and path of the company. These changes proved to be detrimental in some instances as we saw with Scully that Apple's...