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Acting on a Strategic Vision

In: Business and Management

Submitted By vandresen
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1. The use of SWOT Analysis could have helped Electronic Arts (EA) to identify its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Particular, if EA used the SWOT analysis they would identify the weaknesses in their management style. The EA managers are profit and productivity driven while the developers are driven by creativity and freedom. EA managers often demand unrealistic deadlines, set up unfair bonus distribution system and deprive the original developers of freedom and creativity. All of these conditions make many of their developers quit. However EA managers didn’t care so much about this because they could always move on. That is because one of their managerial strategies was to acquire as many studios as they could. Even though, EA managers’ strategies used to work for EA in the past, with rising power of Activision, these strategies had to be revised. That is because Activision’s raising power and preferred management style gain over many of EA developers depriving EA of its best people. The STOW analysis would help EA to identify their weakness in managerial tactics when facing the rising power of rivals.
The SWOT analysis would also help the EA to anticipate the threats of Activision rising marketing power. For example, in the past EA was the largest supplier of entertainment software, while Activision was far behind. Activision had an impressive history; however their sales figures were not so impressive. That clouded EA’s judgment about Activision. However, after the new CEO Robert Kotick came in December 1990 the Activision market capitalization started to climb. According to the Book Management, today Activision Blizzard’s market capitalization consists of 13.3 billion which is nearly twice that of EA. Growing popularity of Activision, created the scarcity of good developers.
2 According to Michael Porter, “organizations

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