It also describes how an organisation can articulate its vision and mission and how it can set its goals and objectives.
1.1.2 Business Definition
Let us begin by understanding the meaning of business. This will help you to define business and to provide answer to the question ‘what is our business?’
We have learnt in courses like financial management that the main aim of an organisation is profit maximisation. To achieve this, the organisation carries out activities like production, marketing and distribution to provide goods and services to its customers at the price they are willing to pay.
Hiriyappa, in his book Strategic Management defines business as “the organised effort by individuals to produce goods and services in a market place and to reap some reward for this effort”. Further he says “functionally a business may be defined as those human activities which involves production or purchase of goods with an object of selling them at a profit margin”
(i) Dimensions of business definition
In a similar manner, Derek Abell suggests the following dimensions for defining the …show more content…
Customer functions depend on the products or services offered to the customers. Alternative technologies show how a particular function can be performed for a customer. We can find out the following three dimensions when we apply Abell’s three-dimensional approach to the illustration of timekeeping business:
• Customers groups include individual customers or industrial users
• Customer functions include finding time, recording time, using watches as a fashionable accessory, and presenting them as gift items.
• Alternative technologies are of the mechanical, quartz digital, and quartz analog types.
This kind of explanation is helpful in defining business clearly. Business, which is defined explicitly, helps strategic management in many ways. That is to say, a clear business definition can show the choice of objectives, be helpful in implementing a choice among different strategic alternatives, make functional policy execution possible and easier, and indicate a suitable organisational