Personal Vision

Political News

 

What is the impact of EU expansion to the U.S?

           Ten new member states have been invited to join the EU, bringing its total membership to 25. The new members will be Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Malta and the Republic of Cyprus. These states will formally join the EU on 1 May 2004.

           Other countries may want to join the EU in the future. Bulgaria and Romania have already begun negotiations but are unlikely to join before 2007. Turkey is yet to start negotiations.

           Personally, I am strongly support the enlargement of EU, because it will balance the world power between new EU and the U.S, in term of Political, Economic and Technology. In the near future EU will become the world's lagest economic block in the world. Therefore, U.S will not dominant the world's political like what they are doing right now.

Business News

What is Strategy?

 

Know yourself, know your opponents, encounter a hundred battles, win a hundred victories.

                                                         -Sun Tzu (approximately 500 B.C.)

 

Strategy as a term has very strong military roots, dating back to the work of Sun Tzu, a Chinese strategist, written in approximately 500 B.C. The application of the principles of military strategies to business competition is more recent phenomenon. Sine the 1960s, in response to the rise of strategic planning in large Western corporations, scholars have become more and more interested in strategic management (Andrews, 1971; Ansoff, 1965; Chandler, 1962; Schendel & Hofer, 1979). As a result, a large number of definitions of strategy have been attempted (Porter, 1980, 1996). Consider how a leading scholar, Afred Chandler (1962) defined strategy as the determination of the basic long term goals and objectives of an enterprise, and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals.

            Mintzberg (1989) noted that a strategy is more than a plan; it can be a ploy, a pattern, a position, or a perspective.

            Some others leading scholar suggested that strategy is the basis on which to build and execute a plan consists of three basic elements: 1/ A destination (where), 2/ A road map (how), 3/ The means of getting there (what).