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Discuss core competency, key staff characteristics, structure

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See the attached file.

Drawing from the attached, discuss the relationship between your organization's skills and staff characteristics. The following questions need to be answered:

1. What is the organization's chief skill (core competency)?

2. What are its key staff characteristics and how do they operate?

3. How do these elements fit with the organization's structure, strategy, style, and systems?

4. Recommend ways (if there are any) that its skills and staff characteristics could be improved to improve organizational performance.

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Solution Summary

The expert discusses the core competency, key staff characteristics and structures are determined.

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Wal-Mart's Chief Skill (Core Competency):

It has long been theorized that organizations can be able to provide superior value to its customers if they can be able to perform extremely well in one or more of three key areas: Product Leadership, Customer intimacy, and Operational Excellence (Treacy and Wiersema, 1992). Wal-Mart's key strengths and core competency lies in its operational excellence. This is reflected in its ability to coordinate and integrate a complex distribution network and information management and to manage efficiently supplier relationships that ensure that it is able to negotiate lower prices and also provide lower prices to its customers which have been the very essence of their success. This implies that aside from people skills that are essential for Wal-Mart's employees to make sales, a key skill that significant and a core competence to Wal-Mart is cutting edge data analysis skills and an understanding of how the retail business works enabling creativity (Biztrain, 2010; Bender, Howell, Lavin & Torgerson, 2001). These skills make it possible for Wal-Mart to be able analyze ways of lowering their operation costs and ensuring operational excellence.

In addition, it is not only Wal-Mart's employees that require these skills, but also Wal-Mart's key strategic partners and suppliers who play a very important role in Wal-Mart's cost cutting strategy and who are interlinked by Wal-Mart's hi-tech supply chain and logistical IT system. The key skills needed by the Wal-Mart's managers, retail analysts and marketing analysts are on how to use sophisticated software programs such as Prospace and RetailLink to access data and to have analytical skills to comprehend and interpret this data, sharing this information up and down Wal-Mart's supply chain and ensuring that the company is able to use this information to generate huge ...

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