Stocks Slumber, Treasury Rates Rise To Two-Year High

A fresh week brought little to liven up the stock market, with the major averages drifting through a fourth-straight losing session. The action came in the bond market, where U.S. bond yields climbed to recent highs with the 10-year note testing the 2.9% mark.

Nearing the close the S&P 500 was off 7 points, 0.4%, at 1,649. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 50 points, 0.3%, to 15,031 and the Nasdaq fell 7 points, 0.2%, to 3,596. In thin volumes typical of the dog days of August, few names stood out as the market sagged to session lows during afternoon trading.

Housing and real estate-related stocks were softer, including builders. That came despite an upgrade of PulteGroup PHM -3.87% from Wells Fargo WFC -0.61%, where analysts said the company is better positioned than rivals to deal with higher mortgage rates. Pulte fell 4.2% and Toll Brothers TOL -3.4%, an upscale builder due to report its latest quarterly results Wednesday, was also trading sharply lower.

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Falcone to Admit to Wrongdoing as S.E.C. Takes a Harder Line

Wall Street’s regulator sent a message on Monday that it was now taking a more aggressive stance on securities settlements as it extracted its first admission of wrongdoing under a new policy.

The regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, said that the hedge fund manager Philip A. Falcone had agreed to admit wrongdoing and to be banned from the securities industry for at least five years to settle market manipulation accusations. As part of the settlement, he and his fund, Harbinger Capital Partners, must also pay more than $18 million.

The deal comes a month after the commission had in a rare move overruled its own enforcement staff to reject a settlement struck with Mr. Falcone and Harbinger.

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Glencore Xstrata Takes $8.47 Billion Charge

LONDON—Glencore Xstrata PLC said Tuesday it has taken an $8.47 billion hit against the value of its assets, which contributed to a net loss in the first half of the year—its first set of results since the mining company was created through a multibillion-dollar acquisition of Anglo-Swiss miner Xstrata PLC.

The Baar, Switzerland-based company swung to a net loss of $8.92 billion in the first six months of the year, compared with a net profit of $2.28 billion in the same period a year earlier. The swing was largely due to a goodwill impairment charge of $7.66 billion against the …

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Corporate Strategy –Meaning & Importance of the Corporate Strategy

The corporate strategy is the means in which the organisation sustains and achieves success. Still, it hardly rises to this level, in spite of many corporate strategies theory & significant research from different organisations over past some decades. Changes over years are actually considered in a form of the small and theoretical refinements, instead large & significant steps needed for more management transition. What explains relative failure of many organisations to make effective strategy? The part of this problem is that the corporations and managers have huge difficulty to clearly & consistently define what the corporate strategy is or much of this struggle is traced to the interpretation of a word strategy itself.

Original meaning of word strategy generally derives from Geek strategia that is been used in military terms & represents an ability to employ accessible resources to win any war. The interpretation has generated a lot of problems when this concept is used among the business context as it implies existence, even necessity, of the opponents. Thus, many managers believed that the corporate strategy will imply the strong focus on the competition, as competition happens almost exclusively at offering level and most of the organisations concentrate the strategic efforts on improving their goods & services that they give. The overemphasis on temporary success, will often obscure type of thinking & emphasis that will lead to the sustained success, and even the continuous repetition of the temporary successes does not equate to the sustainable strategy. In the effort to increase value of the single offerings, organisation is distracted from the larger structure, aim and objective.

In war, the objectives often are clearly defined, and thus strategy is called as the way to the specific end. And this thing has persisted in corporate world and where the strategies are conceived as the plans for accomplishing the specific goals. Even though the corporate strategy is goal oriented, particularly in early stages of the company’s development, nature of the goals implies the temporary success. In contrast, the sustainable success isn’t, and can’t be the end unto itself and goal to attain. Thus, goal orientation gets arguably inappropriate while success needs to be sustained indefinitely. In spite of this, the overwhelming number of the top executives & researchers make the extensive use of the objectives in the quest of long lasting corporate success. Certainly, many factors contribute to that: need of the leaders with the limited tenure to achievements points, tyranny of meeting such expectations of financial markets & most management teams rely on planning and forecasting.

Still, an idea held by many managers that the strategy itself is about the goal achievement exacerbates this situation. Thus, it is very important for the strategists to keep in mind that more specific the objective, further away it might potentially lead this organisation from the optimal big picture. Thus, how strategy must be redefined? It can’t rely very strongly on the objectives nor it focus very heavily on the competition.

Corporate Strategy –Corporate Level Strategy To Look At

Corporate strategy is actually concerned with strategic decisions the business makes, which affect the whole organization. The financial performance, acquisitions and mergers, the human resource management as well as allocation of the resources are all considered to be a part of the corporate strategy. There’re 3 kinds of the corporate level strategy, which the business may employ.

Value Neutral Strategy

The business will employ the value neutral strategy while organization is not very much concerned in allocating resources & manpower since it is to secure the current place in market. Essentially, the value neutral strategy will help to shore up business’ operations plan. To initiate regulatory oversight, making synergy between the departments, working on reducing the risk as well as securing the steady money flow are all value neutral approaches.

Value making Strategy

The value creating business strategy is one where business seeks on edge out the competitors just by gaining more of market share. The strategies help to add the real and the perceived value to business’ products as well as services just by exploiting the economies of scope — resources & capabilities of business that are shared over the whole organization to decrease the costs & increase the efficiency. The key idea behind the value making strategy is the diversification: giving more products to many consumers in a market in attempt to dominate different parts of overall share of market.

Deciding on the Strategy

Whereas it at times is very evident which kind of the corporate level strategy the organization must adopt, it’s very less clear at sometimes, mainly when market is totally unsteady or business will not afford to waste the resources trying out new products & services that might not be very profitable. Just asking yourself some strategy level questions will help in your choice: Does my organization feel threatened by the competitors? In case so, the value making strategy is a right direction and does my business have to tighten the resources & monitor the finances very closely? You need to focus on the value neutral strategy. Consider the value reducing strategy.

Value Reducing Strategy

The businesses at times engage in the value reducing strategies. IT happens on the organization level when stakeholders and customers perceive that business is getting very big for the britches or just top level of executives are getting benefit from the diversification. In such case, the value reducing strategy will refocus business’ market, to help it define the target demographic as well as puts the mechanisms in proper place to prevent any unnecessary and harmful growth.

So, in short, it’s necessary for support leadership to get widespread buy-in prior to making decisions that will have the substantial impact. However, customer departments might have other pressing priorities than to engage with support function’s business strategy review.

To finish…

In several ways strategic choices for the support function are little more constrained than for any business unit. However, it needs higher ingenuity to secure the good outcome: addressing complexity to serve different clients sets

Corporate Strategy – 3 Main Kinds of the Corporate Strategies To Look At

List & discuss different kinds of the Corporate Strategy. The corporate strategy is all about enabling the organization to attain and sustain best performance just by overcoming the business challenges, knowing the industry trends & linking the tangible actions to the clear corporation aim. No matter whether it is pursuing the growth, delivering the innovation, driving the efficiencies and improving the profitability, organizations require strategies they will deliver and implement to drive the successful outcomes. Three main kinds of the corporate strategies are stability, growth, as well as renewal.

Stability – The stability strategy is the corporate strategy where the organization continues doing what it’s currently doing. The examples of the strategy comprise of continuing to serve similar clients just by offering similar product and service, maintaining the market share or sustaining organization’s present business operations. Organization doesn’t grow, however doesn’t fall behind.

Growth – The growth strategy is actually when the organization expands its number of markets that are served and products offered, through the current businesses and through the new businesses. Due to the growth strategy, the organization might increase its revenues, the number of employees and market share. The organizations grow just by using the concentration, horizontal integration, vertical integration, and diversification.

Renewal – When the organization is completely in trouble, then something has to be done. The managers have to develop the strategies, named renewal strategies, which address the declining performance. Two main kinds of the renewal strategies are turnaround and retrenchment strategies. In order, to create the sustainable and long-term success, organisation should first and fundamentally know or relate to the clients. It’s an ongoing encouragement of the understanding that is based on not any specific competitors or temporal objectives that should be at a heart of real strategy. It’s that all objectives must flow naturally. For this reason, lots of companies are now turning to the performance management for improving the budget and to let them to link the corporate strategy to the budget.

Points to think about

1. Take little time to know different requirements of the internal customers, or think very carefully how you will address them. What is an optimum operating model?

2. Think how you will objectively measure value that function delivers. Try and put the broad and clear set of the metrics in right place that everybody will work towards.

3. Make time to secure buy in that you want from different stakeholders. Articulate how they may see benefits of change or bring it with you on your journey.

Being a step removed from cut & thrust of the competition for the customers doesn’t free the support functions from a need for business strategy. The clear & effective strategic direction will benefit the functions like other, driving organisation’s performance & improving alignment as well as morale of the people. Thus put aside glamour of the corporate strategy for one minute, and do not forget importance of the ambitious and clear strategy for Finance, IT or HR function.