Business Application Assignment 2: AMD
The following paper will be a brief discussion of AMD, a massive player in the tech industry. Initially we will discuss AMD’s overall business strategy, including their mission statement, their overall goals as a corporation, and their social responsibility initiatives. In addition to this, we will attempt to dissect their corporate leadership structure and their overall company-wide organization. This investigation will include their employee-centric policies, in particular recruitment and training.
Strategy
AMD manufactures critical computer components such as processors, video cards, and flash memory. Along with Intel, they are basically the only game in town when it comes to non-mobile processing and graphics. A good indicator of their clout in this department is the fact that all current generation video game consoles (Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and WII U) utilize AMD processors and video chips to deliver their high-end graphics and gameplay (Cunningham & Farivar, 2013). Consoles, however, make up a very small percentage of the overall market. So this has been great publicity for AMD, but has done little to help their bottom line.
Now let’s consider AMD’s mission statement and how it applies to their current markets:
"Because our customers’ needs are ever-changing, AMD understands the value of looking towards—and keeping pace with—the future. To help ensure we meet our customers’ needs today and tomorrow, AMD invests in state-of-the-art technology research many years in advance of first commercial use." (AMD, 2014).
This has certainly been true in the past. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, AMD was the first of the two major CPU manufacturers to integrate a ...
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Cunningham, A. Farivar, C. (2013, April 22). The rise and fall of AMD: A company on the ropes. retrieved from http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/04/amd-on-ropes-from-the-top-of-the-mountain-to-the-deepest-valleys/3/.
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To meet the company focus of being the industry leader in R&D, there must be a commitment by management to stay ahead of the curve in technology for R&D.
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Bottom line: The 1090T is the best performing and most exciting thing to happen to the AM3 platform since its advent.
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Frank Questin is a product manager in custom chip, Inc a semi conductor manufacturer in custom chips. He is doing his role as Product Manager from last 14 months and it is his first managerial position. The sales of the company exceeded $ 25 millions in 1986 but due to higher competition the growth had come to standstill.
Capital requirements to set up an assembly line to produce PC's are also relatively low, estimated at roughly a million dollars (Rivkin & Porter,1999 pg. 5) which means that virtually any firm can enter the market easily. Despite sky rocketing demands for PC's, PC producers are unable to capitalize due to increasing number of competitors. The PC industry is also affected by environmental turbulence due to price fluctuations of its components. Constant innovation in PC technology causes older components to be rendered obsolete and prices of older versions to plummet. PC producers who are stuck with inventory of obsolete products incur high costs of dumping these components.
Clearly Polycom’s success does not just stem from quality products and services, but also from the employees who are in the trenches every day; creating new products, increasing productivity, maintaining and increasing customer satisfaction, excellent customer service, etc. Foresight, innovation, and strategic planning are a daily routine to keep the company a successful competitor in the market. It is without a doubt that Polycom needs qualified leadership. High caliber leadership/management is vital to successfully run a global enterprise of this statute. Constant re-organization and product structure changes are necessary to adapt to current and future consumer demands. I interviewed one of the leading managers at Polycom to find out what it takes to keep the machine rolling and what the typical duties of a manager entail.
Hamlin, C. (1994). TEAM BUILDING A GLOBAL TEAM AT APPLE COMPUTER. Employment Relations Today (Wiley), 21(1), 55-62. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
In this paper, we have examined our company of choice, TM Berhad, utilizing each of these four frames as a “spectacle” to determine the leadership approach of its management, and then detailing the more prominent of the frames used.
Phil Carroll, former CEO of U.S. Shell (SOC, the American arm of Royal Dutch Shell) believed in the importance of the servant-leader model of leadership. In the early 1990’s, when this new leadership model was introduced, it shook the foundations of a company that had known success for many years using a more traditional authoritarian model of leadership. He wanted to completely transform the company into an organization that could continue to expand, and make a profit doing so. The company needed to tap into the resource it had (and still does) right under its nose – its employees! Mr. Carroll wanted the culture of the company to be transformed into a model of self-directed leaders who share knowledge amongst each other, creating an environment of continuos improvement. According to the American Management Association “Phil Carroll has led Shell Oil Company toward a significant transformation of its corporate culture. It is comprised of a new vision, a new business model, a new system of governance, a new concept of leadership, and the use of learning...
“After the integrated circuits the only place to go was down—in size that it. Large scale integration (LS) could fit hundreds of components onto one chip. By the 1980’s, very large scale integration (VLSI) squeezed hundreds of thousands of components onto a chip. Ultra-Large scale integration (ULSI) increased that number into millions. The ability to fit so much onto an area about half the size of ...
“The idea that would spawn microsoft generated when Paul Allen showed Bill Gates the January 1,1975 issue of popular electronics that demonstrated Altair 8800.” (Nytime.com). Gates and Allen were curious and saw potential to make it better than what it already was.This soon led to make the microcomputer and he would call it the Micro Instrument and Telemetry system (MITS).
As a company that owns majority of the computer-chip market, Intel is a “monopoly”. According to the textbook Business Ethics: Concept and Cases (Velaquez, 2014) Intel owned 90 percent of the market when they started their power trip. Furthermore, the company has managed to control 71% of the x86 technology market, as of 2011. To further support this claim,
The purpose of writing this essay is to give an idea how these two respected CEOs of multinational companies has changed the world. Technology is booming nowadays, even the minor things that we can do manually are done using technology. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple computer and Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, has changed the world. These two leaders are best known for their innovations which has taken our world to the next level. Steve and Bill has got something in common. Surprisingly, both of these CEO had never graduated from college, but they are known to be the world most successful leaders and they both work in the same kind of company (Lashinsky, 2013). Nevertheless, their leadership styles differs (Peralta,2011). The way they treat the employees at the workplace is in contrast.
Leadership is one of the most important facets in organizations. In most cases, leaders act with respect to organizational culture as well as the codes of conduct that determine the manner in which leaders relate with subordinates. Leadership entails the use of effective communication skills to get activities done in the workplace and to ensure that employees shelve their individual interests for the sake of their organizations’ shared targets. It is the role of leaders to ensure that consumers attain high quality products and services by making certain that members of their firms’ workforce are fully motivated to work effectively and utilize resources in an efficient manner (Bass, 22). With the increasingly sophisticated nature of the corporate world, leadership should not be based solely on the desire to control and coordinate affairs within the workplace, but leaders should also exhibit positive examples and continually monitor the changing trends in corporate governance to initiate the most relevant guidelines. Competitiveness can only be attained when leaders are in a position to set the right standards in their firms and coordinate affairs appropriately by understanding consumer and employee needs.