Case analysis reflection

Appendix 5 The “Reflection on case analysis” (1 single-spaced page minimum) 1. What was the most useful or meaningful thing you learned, or insight you gained, during this session? There are always arguments you can find to defend one position and it is easy to stick with it. Why I learnt from the session is the importance of being open to different opinions. This doesn’t mean necessarily change your mind but think about it more and be critical. Furthermore, think of the whole picture, not just focus on one single success or failure. Criticize it by its whole. 2. What were the major points, lessons, concepts, etc. in the class? How useful the CAGE framework can be to analyze a company. It gives a whole perspective. Determining if a company is globally successful we might think of geographical distance as the main criteria of being global. But it is actually more complicated than that, is about the culture, administration and economy too. This is why the CAGE framework gives you a complete scenario and it is important to always think of it when concerning an international company. 3. What was the muddiest point in this session? (In other words, what was least clear to you?) Wal-Mart made mistakes, especially with China and Germany. But what did Wal-Mart actually learnt from those mistakes and how did it used that experience in other business cases. Because it was clear Wal-Mart was a failure in those countries, but what happened next? It is not clear to me in which way does it actually 4. What question(s) remain uppermost in your mind? Is there a metric that determines if a company is global or not? I mean, it could be that certain percent of their profits should come from foreign countries to be considered as global. Or the number of countries in which has been successful in compared to the ones that failed. Since globalization is a “new” topic there can be many misinterpretations of being global. For example Apple, it has retail stores in 16 countries. But it hasn’t really done anything to adapt to the different markets. It is the same product in each country. Whereas in Wal-Mart the whole strategy has to change since it is a service.