Strategic Analysis Of Pixar, Winston Churchill

It is important to implement the right and winning strategies fit into the company’s internal and external situations which can enhance the organization performance, build sustainable competitive advantage and uplifting company’s productivity.

All organizations will encounter strategic challenges over their duration of years in business. These challenges will come at all different levels across the company. Knowing that these challenges have happened in the past and will happen in the future, it is important to see how an organization will react to overcome the challenges.

Introduction: The Walt Disney Company is on the threshold of a new era. Michael Eisner has stepped down from his position as CEO and turned over the reigns to Robert Iger. A lot of turmoil has been brewing through the company over the last four years; many people are hoping that this change in leadership will put Disney back on the road to success. Issues began around mid-2002; when declining earnings, fleeing shareholders, and

Its large size gives Disney several advantages, such as a large budget and a large human resource base. Internally, Disney follows a top-down approach, where managers tend to impose the culture, and bureaucracy is considered large with 185,000 employees in 2016 (Forbes, 2016). The decision making lies at top management level, giving the company a hierarchical structure. In the creative world Disney is known to make movies based on profitability, rather than quality of animation and image. Pixar’s core competence is their technological 3D success in computer animation. When looking at the staff at Pixar , it can be seen that they are very technically educated and have a lot of in-house creativity. This is the reason for their high level of innovation. Furthermore, they focus on quality instead of sales figures. Internally, Pixar uses the bottom-up approach, where input of employees is highly valued, and Pixar offers a very communicative and open working environment.

Because no organization is immune to the constant forces of change, uncertainty and complexity, those forces should be channeled to drive and fuel the competitive landscape. The core values serve as its foundational strategy. “A strategy, at its essence, attempts to capture what the company wants to be and how it plans to get there” (Morris, 2011, p. 206). In order for an organization to cohesively work toward a common objective, a strategic plan must be put into place. The strategy should reflect core values and identify

1. What is Walt Disney Company’s corporate generic strategy? Explain the reason for your answer.

Pixar is a company that has ties to other major corporations in our American culture. Pixar Animation Studios started as a part of the Lucas film computer group, which is owned by George Lucas the creator of Star Wars. However, after receiving funding from Steve Jobs the division became its own corporation in 1986. After that Disney purchased Pixar, which allowed Steve Jobs to become a shareholder in Disney also. With these changes due to the ownership of the corporation an analysis of managerial economics is overdue. What follows is an evaluate how Pixar attains balance between culture, rewards, and boundaries, what is Pixar’s organizational structure and why they have the structure they have, how Pixar’s leadership helps to create an ethical organization, how Pixar’s innovation helps the organization to accomplish its goals, how emotional intelligence helps the leadership guide the company, and how Pixar has overcome barriers to change. Pixar’s history has presented the firm with challenges and the firm has managed to overcome those challenges, anyone who plans to one day own their own business should look at the company and understand how the firm accomplished their tasks despite the presented challenges. The merger with Disney resulted in some problems for Pixar, but the merger was pursued for a reason. By merging, both firm have the potential to save time and money; there is also the potential to learn from each other.

The world today is constantly changing. Certain aspects of the world are beginning to advance and transform more rapidly than others, such as technology. These modern transformations of society are important to take into account when developing a strategic plan for any organization. This is because these advances in society can pose “threats, challenges, or opportunities” to the organization at hand (Bryson 2011, 151). Furthermore, according to Bryson assessing the strengths and weakness of an organization in relation to these different features that were just mentioned is an important step in the strategic planning process (Bryson 2011, 151-152). Assessing these strengths and weakness involves members or an organization to identify and analyze different external and internal trends and then develop a SWOC/T analysis of how these external and internal trends can come together to affect the impending organization.

Strategic - Pinpoint the core problem and identify the best solution; identify ways to transform an obstacle into an opportunity

“Nothing exemplifies this more than our creative brain trust and our daily review process” (Catmull, 2008, p.4) Hindrances incorporate getting individuals in diverse fields to treat each other as associates. Pixar University offers an accumulation of in-house courses that employees take to assimilate the specialties that are diverse between individuals. Pixar University role is preparing and broadly to educate individuals as they mature in their professions. Likewise it offers a mixture of discretionary classes that give individuals from diverse orders the chance to blend and acknowledge what everybody does. It has been very satisfying to see the standards and methodologies we created at Pixar change this studio (Catmull,

When discussing business with friends and family, the knowledge expressed concerning how businesses succeed can be surprising. People are often on the outside looking in and do not realize how practices have changed over the years. From the 1960’s, businesses have begun to analyze competition in markets, strategic leadership, along with the social responsibility of the corporation (Guerras-Martin, Madhok, & Montoro-Sanchez, 2014). In addition, the incorporation of web-sites and computer interaction has also greatly influenced business practices. Strategic management can be described as the actions demonstrated by top management to evaluate internal and external environments of an organization in order to set goals and oversee them (Parnell, 2008). Businesses of today must exemplify the ability to be competitive in addition to realizing inner strengths and weaknesses. In addition, this writer would continue the conversation, describing the importance of a plan,

As Schein (2010, p.32) himself had concluded, any group’s culture can be studied at the three levels. The three levels of culture allows for an analysis of Pixar’s organizational cultural from an observational level. Information can be readily drawn from business reviews, news articles on Pixar, interviews with Pixar’s employees and Pixar’s website, thus making Edgar Schein’s three levels of culture an ideal model for analysis of Pixar’s culture.

The demographics of the population that like animation encompasses baby boomers, adults and large numbers of children alike, leads to an improvement in the revenue and exposure for the animation industry (See Exhibit 1 for Percentage of total births). Therefore the social factors are also favorable.

Known to be one of the largest producers of multi-media content, Walt Disney and Pixar greatly impacted the entertainment industry with the use of three-dimensional generated content. It quickly gained popularity with the release of its animated movies and especially got the attention of children from their sequels. With the growing popularity, the competition in the media industry began to increase. Disney was then faced with a difficult decision regarding its relationship with Pixar on whether they should acquire or not acquire the company.

Beginning with the pre-2005 context of Disney’s business environment I will show why Eisner’s autocratic style of management was impeding the necessary changes the company needed to survive in light of the issues facing the company. Following on from this analysis I can assess the process of change which the company undertook relating to relevant theories in the strategic change literature. This will allow me to evaluate the effectiveness of the leadership during this process and show how CEO Iger was central to the changes which took place, again in accordance with strategic leadership theories. Finally I will attempt to identify how Disney has harnessed its key resources and core competencies throughout the process of strategic change to give itself a