Misalignment

The organization I will analyze for this post is the NBA's New York Knicks a professional basketball team.

Last week the New York Knicks' head coach Mike D'Antoni resigned. The Knicks had been struggling to win games and were not meshing as a group on the court. D'Antoni resigned and Mike Woodson took over as head coach. Since the coaching change the Knicks have won 5 straight games and could be on the winning track.

7-S Analysis

Strategy -

Old

• Free-flowing, point guard lead offense
• Outscore our opponents
• Play as little defense as possible

New

• Defense 1st
• Run the offense through two Star Players

Structure

Old

• Head Coach calls plays
• Point Guard directs the offense and decides who gets the ball and when they get it

New

• Head Coach still calls plays
• Star Players run the offense instead of the point guard

Staff

• Head Coach - Mike Woodson replaced D'Antoni
• Assistant Coach
• Team Captains
• Star Players
• Role Players

Most of the players are offense 1st players who don't play much defense mixed with a few defense 1st players

Skills

• Mostly scoring/offensive skills
• Passing, shooting, dunking, etc.

Systems

Old

• Incentives - If you play well you will get more time

New

• Incentives - if you play well you will get more time, if you don't want to play defense you won't play

Style

• Friendly, non confrontational

Shared Values

• Winning
• Playing Defense

The main issue with the Knicks seems to be a personnel and strategy issue. The old coach wanted an offense that was run by the point guard (a non star player) which resulted in the star players not getting the ball as much as they wanted which made them unhappy. This lead to team chemistry issues and poor play on the court. The players did not want to listen to the coach. When D'Antoni resigned and Mike Woodson took over the strategy changed where the star players played a bigger role in the offense. Woodson also emphasized playing defense. These changes to personnel and strategy have helped the Knicks play better and helped them to win more games.

By fixing the personnel issue and aligning the players to the correct strategy to maximize the overall team talents (offense and some defense) the team has been performing better and winning makes all the problems go away (for now at least)

One potential issue is that most of the Knicks players are not very good at defense and the coach wants to focus on Defense which could result in another misalignment in the future. The challenge for the new coach is to get the players to buy into his strategy of playing defense and letting the defense lead to better offense.

Could NBA players really create their own league?

During the recent NBA lock-out between the NBA players and the team owners one idea that was continually kicked around was the idea of the players leaving the NBA to create their own league. This is a fascinating idea since the NBA revenue is driven by its Players marketability and popularity in most cases a fact with which players are familiar. Thus I wanted to conduct a 5-forces analysis on the NBA to see how feasible it would be for players to create their own league.

Barrier to Entry - Extremely High - The players would need to come up with huge capital investments to put together a team, secure an arena lease and market the new league. Making the team and marketing would be easy for the players due to their vast popularity but getting capital together for an arena, staffing the teams with support (GM, coaches, office staff, arena crews), and arranging scheduling and travel costs is really expensive. Even though the players make millions of dollars from their current NBA contracts the owners who are Billionaires with sufficient capital often loose money running their NBA teams. Additionally most cities do not have multiple NBA quality arenas and most of those are already contracted out to the resident NBA team increasing the difficulty in securing a regular arena to host games in.

Supplier Power - High In this instance I would argue that the players are both the suppliers and the Product if the Players decided to quit the league (NBA or new players league) would struggle to continue to put a decent product on the court. Many NBA analysts have said that the fans want to watch certain players and if those players are not playing they won't watch. The league also has to negotiate TV contracts giving companies like ESPN, TNT, and Fox power

Buyer Power - High, the fans pay for the league through ticket sales, merchandising, and TV ratings. if the Fans are unhappy revenue falls

Rivalry - Low currently the NBA has no rival league and even if the players create their own league the NBA would still have the most money and while they may struggle at first eventually they will be able to out-last the player league

Substitutes - High - The NBA or a player's league would have to compete directly with College Basketball, the NFL, and Professional baseball. The high popularity of these other sports gives buyers/fans even more power because the fans can (and have in the past) switched to other sports when they didn't like the NBA. This will be true for a new player's league as well.

Overall I don't think the players could realistically run a viable league. They are great athletes and many have some business knowledge but I believe that they do not understand the amount of time or money it takes to run a pro-basketball team let alone an entire league. We are all much better off that the NBA and the players settled the lock-out instead of the players creating their own league.

Competing With the World of Warcraft - Journal Post 2

I am a huge gamer. I love video games and especially World of Warcraft (WoW). Being the budding strategist that I am I began to think about what it would be like competing with WoW thus I began thinking about a 5 forces analysis of the MMORPG industry in which WoW is the market giant. The Microsoft of the industry.

Barriers to Entry - high - in 2008 the CEO of Activision estimated that it would take a company between $500 Million and $1 Billion dollars to create a competitive game to WoW (and that is true even for other large game makers like Microsoft and EA Sports) and thus make it difficult to enter then industry. http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/02/activision-ceo/

Supplier Power - medium - The suppliers to the industry are the video game designers. The best designers are hard to get but there are plenty of other designers to hire. The trick is getting the right designers who have the right skill and the right passion to keep the game exciting for both new and old players

Buyer Power - High - there are a lot of substitutes in the video game industry in general and several other MMORPG games that people can play instead of WoW giving the buyers (game subscribers) a lot of power and forcing WoW to continually innovate and respond to player concerns. If WoW stopped trying to keep its players and attract new ones through innovation the players would get bored and leave.

Rivalry - Low - There are lots of other video game makers but in the MMORPG, WoW really has not competitors. Most new MMORPG games don't have the sustaining power that WoW does. I constantly hear players say they are going to leave and try a new game but those games just do not last. This is an interesting industry in that new games are always coming out but none can stand up to WoW and so they quickly fade.

Substitutes - High - there are a lot of substitutes for WoW. Other video games (PC, Mac, XBox, PS3, Wii, etc) that people can play and different formats that they can play in. WoW also has to compete with TV, movies, and sports for peoples time. One of the downsides of being in an entertainment company is the high amount of substitutes so you constantly have to make people believe that they should play your game instead of choosing other forms of entertainment. This keep the game new and exciting even though it has been around since 2004.

Blizzard Entertainment (who makes WoW) is in a really powerful and enviable position but if they are not careful they could loose it through alienating old players and failing to pickup new ones. http://outdps.com/2011/09/06/competing-interests-in-the-wow-playerbase/

1st Strategy Journal

Apple Makes Push into iPad textbooks - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204555904577169523446883172.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

Apple recently announced that it will enter the digital textbook market. This is an interesting decision as it seems Apple is trying to get into a new profit pool. The above article states that Apple is trying to further increase demand for its popular iPad. Profit Pools are all usually about finding compliments to existing product lines. While expanding into Textbooks is not exactly a big compliment it does give people additional reasons to purchase/use the iPad (beyond just playing games and watching videos. This, in turn, drives up demand and should increase revenues for Apple.

Adding textbooks may not significantly increase iPad sales but it should increase total revenues of Apple overall. This is because the people who already have the iPad (for instance students and teachers) will now also consider purchasing their textbooks from Apple as well. Since these digital textbooks are relatively inexpensive to distribute and take little inventory space this could be a very good profit pool for Apple. Additionally, even though rival tablets like Amazon's Kindle also produce digital books there is little competition between the two for textbooks since the people who own iPads are unlikely to purchase their textbook for the Kindle when they can get it for the iPad instead and vice versa.