Increasing revenues, increasing profits, increasing dividends, increasing profit margins, increasing returns on investment, increasing earnings per share, increasing stock prices, improving cash flow, and so on are all financial goals. Strategic goals include gaining a greater proportion of the market, delivering goods faster than competitors, reducing the time from design to market, lowering costs, producing better products than competitors, expanding geographically faster than competitors, and so on (Brown, 2020). Although most businesses as noted by do so, combining two or more methods may be very harmful if it is taken too far. No company has the resources to implement all of the possible business plans. It is time to make some tough choices and create some priorities. Integration strategies include; forward, backward and horizontal integration. Diversification strategies can be related or unrelated. Defensive strategies can be retrenchment, divestiture or liquidation, and each has some guidelines. Consumers who are price-sensitive want standardized items to be produced at a low per-unit cost, where Cost Leadership comes in. Michael Porter’s Five Generic Strategies may be broken down into five distinct categories.
Creating a manageable list of the most appealing potential solutions is necessary. We need to know the pros and cons of each of these options and the trade-offs, expenses, and gains they entail. Most of the managers and employees involved in developing the organization’s mission and vision, conducting the external analysis, and conducting the internal audit should be involved in assessing the various alternatives (Grant, 2021). Participants’ ideas should be addressed together in a series of sessions to see whether they can be implemented. The methods should be rated in order of attractiveness once all possible options have been presented and comprehended by participants. There are three stages of the formulation of strategy. As a result of the SWOT Matrix, managers can construct four strategies: Using a four-quadrant framework, you may determine if a firm should pursue an aggressive, cautious, defensive, or competitive strategy. Graphically depicts divisional differences in comparative market share and growth rate for the industry in the B C G Matrix.
Graduate-level Response
Question 1 as posted at Assignmenthelpsite.com
Backward integration is a technique in which a company acquires or merges with suppliers of raw materials. A company’s subsidiary may also help it oversee its supply chain. Forward integration helps organizations build consumer relationships by performing distribution operations (David & David, 2016). If Dr Pepper Snapple’s CEO asks me whether one should employ backwards, either forward or integration, I will propose backward. Beverage firms operate in a highly competitive market, so they need inexpensive and simple raw material access to develop economies of scale. Forward integration may create monopolies.
Question 2
Ethical and cultural issues are crucial to any organization because they give values, lead the firm, keep the business legitimate, and increase goodwill. One of the most distinguishing characteristics of a company is its culture (David & David, 2016). When a company’s strategy evolves, it is the human factor that provides unity and purpose, inspiring a sense of dedication and productivity in the workforce. Every one of us has a fundamental need to understand and make sense of the world.
References
Brown, W. B. (2020). Turning Strategy into Action: A Multisite Case Study Assessing the Impact of Hoshin Kanri Routines on Relational Coordination Dimensions within the Context of Strategic Planning. Cornerstone University. Retrieved from
David, F., & David, F. R. (2016). Strategic management: A competitive advantage approach, concepts and cases (p. 696). Florence: PearsonPrentice Hall.
Grant, R. M. (2021). Contemporary strategy analysis. John Wiley & Sons.
SCRIPT SPEECH
Ethical dimensions of autonomy in two specific cases: autonomous weapons systems and autonomous vehicles
Introduction
This study addresses the possibly distinct moral and ethical challenges that autonomous weapons and vehicles provide in comparison to non-autonomous weapon systems. The focus will also be on how they connect to the concept of just warfare to outline several of the most important considerations for autonomous weapons and vehicles in the future. Nevertheless, it does not address important legal considerations concerning automated vehicles and weapons, like whether humanitarian law requires people to make each particular life-or-death decision. In addition, ethics does not evaluate whether autonomous weapons and vehicles breach the Marten Amendment of the International Conventions by harming a sense of morality. Furthermore, notes that various critics of autonomous weapons and vehicles offer different reasons, as do various critiques of those critics; hence, there are aspects of each topic that are not explored here. This article concludes that the ethical difficulties posed by autonomous weapons might differ greatly based on the type of weapon. There might be 3 types of autonomous weapons and vehicles: ammunition, launchers, and operating systems. Problems may be exaggerated when autonomous weapons and vehicles are compared to next-generation munitions, but when autonomous weapon stations or operational processes for directing battles are considered, autonomous weapons and vehicles offer more significant concerns. War judgments will need extreme caution and an emphasis on preserving the primacy of the individual.
Autonomous weapons systems and autonomous vehicles
Considering the U.S. and others’ employment of drones targeting terrorists and rebels throughout the globe, there is a propensity to equate the overall category of military robotics with particular instances of drone attacks. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to ignore the massive military robotics forest in favor of the drone attack trees. Existing platforms illustrate, for instance, that drones are potentially useful for much more than just targeted attacks, and that in the near they might participate in an even broader range of military operations. In addition, the emphasis on drone attacks assumes that military robots are exclusively applicable in the air.
Autonomy has already been widely employed in army automation, such as in autopilot, recognizing and tracking possible targets, guiding, and weapon detonation. Even while modestly armed drones are currently possible, there remains substantial uncertainty about just the state of art in machine learning and its applicability to armies. While machines that can tell the difference between a person holding a gun and a human with a stick appear to be a long way off, technology is rapidly progressing. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen how swiftly and how well society will be equipped. Only a few military systems have human-supervised autonomy at the moment. For instance, many close-in missile systems used by the US army and much more than half a dozen other armies across the world feature continuous autofocus. In most cases, the system relies on an operator to detect and identify hostile missiles or planes, then fire at those. If the amount of new attacks is so great that a human pilot can’t successfully target and fire against them, the operators can switch to autonomous transmission, which allows the machine to focus as well as fire against the dangers.
Ethics in the use of autonomous vehicles and weapons
Ethic 1: Propensity to equate the overall field of military automation with particular autonomous vehicles.
Describing automated weapons as a defense system that picks and strikes targets on its own makes intuitive understanding from a sensible standpoint. Furthermore, at the extremities, it is simple to define what defines autonomous weapons and vehicles. Whereas a “dumb” bomb dropped by a B-29 during WWII is not an automated weapon, a hunter-killer aircraft that uses an algorithm to determine who to attack or when to fire weaponry is. Nevertheless, there is a large and hazy chasm between such extremesfrom gradual developments in today’s precisely guided missiles to humanoid robots haunting the earththat hampers our understanding of the ethical implications posed by autonomous vehicles and weapons and the consequences of just war theory.
Ethic 2: Autonomous weapons will be intrinsically difficult to use.
Some fear that autonomous weapons will be intrinsically difficult to use in a manner that distinguishes between fighters and unarmed civilians and only kills when required. A lack of discrimination would contravene both just war theory and the law of war. As a result, some fear that armed drones would be unmanageable, as they will be prone to faults and unable to function predictably.
In addition, critics of autonomous weapons and vehicles say that since autonomous weapons are not human, they would struggle to make sound decisions. For instance, a person soldier may have compassion and utilize discretion to decide not to murder a legitimate fighter who is laying down their weapon or seems to be ready to surrender, but a robotic soldier would obey its orders and kill the legal fighter. This might impede the employment of autonomous cars and weaponry reasonably.
Furthermore, armed drones may create problems about behavior in warfare from the standpoint of just war. Automated driving that cannot follow benign isolation for captives, for instance, would violate fundamental just war principles; nonetheless, their failure to conform ensures that respectable armies would not employ them in such circumstances. Specifically, for this reason, it makes the most sense to compare autonomous weapons against current weapons in actual circumstances.
Ethic 3: The absence of significant people’s influence creates a moral (and legal) responsibility void.
One of the main justifications advanced by critics of autonomous weapons and vehicles is that the absence of effective human control creates a moral (and legal) responsibility void. If these machines break down or commit atrocities, there is no single individual to hold responsible, because there would be for a drone pilot, the pilot in the aircraft, or maintenance personnel today. Possibly exclusive to autonomous weaponry and vehicles. At the operating level, unmanned aerial military robots do not seem to establish an undue moral distancing from battle. For instance, the current study indicates that drone operators suffer from psychiatric disorders at rates comparable to cockpit pilots.
On the other side of the argument, viewing autonomous weapons and vehicles as actors, instead of devices, is part of the issue. As with todays modern guns, the human operator who launches automated weapons and vehicles munitions or engages autonomous weapons and vehicles system is still responsible for ensuring that the organization will function in a morally permissible manner to the best of anyone’s ability to foresee. Therefore, preparation and education are crucial to preventing a responsibility gap. By assuring that prospective operators of autonomous weapons and vehicles comprehend how they function and feel personally responsible for their use, armies may, in theory, prevent moral duty for using force from being offloaded.
Ethic 4: They could be fundamentally harmful since they dehumanize their victims.
Source is
If a machine lacking intents or morals decides to murder, it raises questions about the victim’s demise. This reasoning is morally compelling. According to human rights law researcher Christof Heyns, “choices about death and life in armed combat may call for empathy and instinct.” On the other hand, everyone who joins the military is aware of the hazards associated, including the possibility of death; what distinction does the manner of death make? In an abstract sense, maybe there’s something unedifying about dying as a result of a computer. However, how is being shot through the brain or heart and quickly murdered by a machine inherently better than just being bludgeoned by a human, set ablaze, or murdered by a cruise missile attack? The honor concept has a psychological resonance, yet it may glamorize conflict.
Conclusion
Lastly, just war theory presents an intriguing prism by which to evaluate autonomous weapons and equipment: may they contribute to a future in which people are farther detached from the practice of combat than ever before, yet fighting itself is becoming more accurate and causes less needless suffering? These are hard concerns surrounding the acceptable role for people in warfare, which are influenced by the balance between appraising automated weapons and vehicles predicated on a logic of effects and a logic of ethics. It will be crucial to guarantee that the recruitment and selection process remains vital to battle under any circumstance.
References
Asaro, P. (2016). Hands up, don’t shoot!” HRI and the automation of police use of force. Journal of human-robot interaction, 5(3), 55-69.
Etzioni, A., & Etzioni, O. (2017). Pros and cons of autonomous weapons systems. Military Review, May-June.
Lin, P. (2016). Why ethics matters for autonomous cars. In Autonomous driving (pp. 69-85). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Roff, H. M., & Moyes, R. (2016, April). Meaningful human control, artificial intelligence, and autonomous weapons. In Briefing Report Prepared for the Informal Meeting of Experts on Lethal Au-Tonomous Weapons Systems, UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
