No Longer Can a Business Operate Efficiently and Effectively by Treating Customers Suppliers and Other Stakeholders as Exogenous or Separate from the Business Itself

A business nowadays can no longer stand on its own. Gone are the days when a manufacturing company produces what it must, with blatant disregard for about 10% damaged goods in the inventory available for sale. In America and other first world countries, inexistent are the days when an employer can ignore employee dissatisfaction. However, maintaining good supplier-customer relationship is still optional for businesses. These are all because of all the innovations that have happened the past two decades; competition is sprouting up from nowhere on a daily basis, new technologies become available within a matter of weeks and the laws and regulations (in first world countries) make it hard for the business to do anything dodgy, directly to their employees or their customers.

In the article, ‘The Phase Transition of Markets and Organizations: The New Intelligence and Entrepreneurial Frontier’, the authors Lusch, Liu and Chen (2010) discussed that businesses nowadays need a strategy wherein all or majority of its stakeholders are interested in the achievement of such. A business cannot operate on its own, producing what it has always produced the entire time of its existence, without consulting whether the customers are quite happy with their products. In this day and age, the customers can easily switch and buy from the competitor; as such, a business must continuously capture the market fad, upgrade products according to customer demands and to do this, the business must do tons of market research. Next, an employee cannot be maltreated in any way because employees have voices, thanks to the World Wide Web who can make it known to the rest of world. Walmart’s past and current employees, for instance, have a website dedicated to their opinions alone (Chen 2010). In first world countries, any offense done to the employee can give way to big lawsuits and media frenzy, costing a business millions of dollars in damages. Lastly, the author of this paper does not exactly agree with the author of the article about suppliers being essential to achieve strategy. As mentioned earlier in this paper, this is the day and age of competition, a business has the option to maintain long-term relations with suppliers or continuously replace them (someone in the market is bound to be offering the same goods and/or services); either course of action is subject to its own pros and cons that the business must weigh-in before making a decision.

Michael Porter’s 5-Forces Industry analysis provides a model for a strategic manager (QuickMBA n.d.). The model says that the industry is being driven by five forces: