Capstone-7160

  Strategic management is the foundation for any firm striving to be successful. As defined in our text, strategic management, “is the art and science of formulating, implementing, and evaluating cross-functional decisions that enable an organization to achieve its objectives.” For Adobe, this was recently more evident than ever with the decision to move to a cloud-based structure. In order to be effective, they needed a solid game plan to move forward with strategic implementation. Separate from the planning phase, implementation is a crucial part of ensuring action taken goes according to plan, and possibly adjusts as necessary in order to achieve the results outlined in the plan. As you can imagine, this stage is not only critically important but also extremely difficult. Coinciding with a relatively newer trend, Adobe has a Chief Strategy Officer (CSO), Scott Belsky, that oversees this portion of the business. After a strategy is planned and implemented, evaluation must take pla

   Adobe is a United States based corporation with global reach and ties. Shifting away from the previous standard of packaging and shipping a software product, Adobe has made it easier to provide products, via subscription, to users all across the globe. While The US still makes up the majority of the customer base, just under half of all other users are outside of the US. This indicates Adobe's reach far and wide as a truly global firm. As a multinational corporation, there are almost endless possibilities for ensuring business is being conducted in a positive, legal, and ethical manner but also in way that allows expansion and not only stable but increased revenue. As almost an entirely digital product-offering firm, Adobe has been able to offer products and services to extend beyond borders in an instant. Given the vast number of cultural variation brought up in the text, another important aspect of Adobe not only in terms of leadership but also staff, is diversity. https://www

Many companies have adopted or at least become more transparent about their intentions to better stewards to individuals or groups of people, the environment, or ethics. Our text highlights that "Ethics Is Good Business" and it's more than just a good idea, it's a great practice. Most people are familiar with companies such as Enron or WorldCom that had significant ethics and legal violations or Exxon which has been responsible for significant environmental disasters. For Enron and WorldCom, their questionable practices lead to further investigation that uncovered serious violations, ultimately leading to their demise. Exxon hasn't quite suffered a similar fate but has seen hits to their stock and large rulings against them financially, although arguably not near enough. Having a proactive approach to preventing issues and even promoting responsible practices is becoming more of the norm as customers and business partners are looking for firms that display good bu

A shift from selling packaged software to offering it on the cloud was a significant step and one that would need to venture into the world of the unknown. A strategy like this would require significant planning and strenuous implementation, adapting and taking corrective when necessary. Even after all that takes place, there is still the task of evaluating the strategy. With any strategy rollout, especially one as large as this, there are benchmarks, lessons learned, and best practices that can all be identified and documented. This is then used to make sure that this strategy was effective and in line with organizational and managerial goals to continually improve. Looking at Richard Rumelt's four criteria to evaluate a strategy, we can see the effectiveness of Adobe's strategy to become fully cloud-reliant. The first, consistency, was shown in the organizational goal to shift to the cloud model. This goal was well communicated, accepted, and aligned all employees intentions

Adobe was committed to the cloud transition but needed to ensure cooperation and coordination with proper management oversight was in place in order to have a successful implementation. Getting away from the "product in a box" type of sales and now offering subscription based services was going to create continuous and better anticipated revenue. Retaining customers that may be resistant to change and appealing to new customers to expand their new model was critical to their success for the immediate and long term. Numerous departments contributed to the implementation of this systemic and strategic implementation. The Marketing department needed to ensure the change in product offerings was well messaged for existing customers so that they would be more comfortable with the transition and willing to trust a cloud platform for their long trusted and used box products but also attract new customers with these revolutionary and more accessible products. The Finance and Accounti

It's always easier to implement a particular strategy when there's a plan in place. Fortunately for Adobe, they had a great plan and knew where they wanted to go, they just needed to get there. As an impressive feat and benchmark for other firms to model, Adobe took it's portfolio of software and went to the cloud with it. The idea and premise raised concerns and doubts but after difficult financial times, they decided to switch gears. In 2009, Adobe started on strategy formulation and after the 2011 announcement, Creative Cloud was going to be implemented. For Adobe, this was a huge step and implementation had to go well adhering to the plan. One of the first steps was allocating resources to the transition by way of personnel and $200 million in funding. In order for this to be a seamless transition for customers, Adobe had to continue to sell software products as it always had, in the form of physical copies while also enabling users to purchase cloud based tools and sub