Case Study Description of Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C)
Nurturing Green is a three-year-old private company that is trying to change the gift-giving culture of India by offering attractively packaged potted plants in place of the traditional candy or cut flower bouquets presented on special occasions to friends, family and business associates. The founder of the start-up is a young, passionate entrepreneur who is risking much in order to grow his company. To realize the idea of "green gifting" to help the environment, he has accepted funding from a venture capitalist firm in exchange for giving up 25 per cent equity in his business. Now, it is time to revisit that agreement and, although the company has been very successful, the owner is concerned that the investors will demand more control and a faster growth focus than he is willing or able to meet. He is also worried about the sales forecast, return on investment for the short and the long term, monthly cash flows and employee motivation and performance reviews. Should he respond to the many requests to franchise the business or should he concentrate on developing the brand in new markets? How can he expand business-to-business sales while also opening more stores in malls in all parts of the country to sell directly to customers? Will the new website develop more online sales? As he prepares for a meeting with the auditors and investors, the owner looks for a solution to continue growing while retaining control over his company. Deepak Pandit is affiliated with Management Development Institute. Arun Sahay is affiliated with Birla Institute of Management Technology.
Swot Analysis of "Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C)" written by Deepak Pandit, Arun Sahay includes – strengths weakness that are internal strategic factors of the organization, and opportunities and threats that Nurturing Green facing as an external strategic factors. Some of the topics covered in Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) case study are - Strategic Management Strategies, International business, Strategy and Leadership & Managing People.
Some of the macro environment factors that can be used to understand the Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) casestudy better are - – customer relationship management is fast transforming because of increasing concerns over data privacy, geopolitical disruptions, supply chains are disrupted by pandemic , competitive advantages are harder to sustain because of technology dispersion, increasing commodity prices, there is increasing trade war between United States & China, cloud computing is disrupting traditional business models,
increasing transportation and logistics costs, talent flight as more people leaving formal jobs, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C)
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University , we believe that protagonist in Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) case study can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Nurturing Green, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Nurturing Green operates in.
According to Harvard Business Review, 75% of the managers use SWOT analysis for various purposes such as – evaluating current scenario, strategic planning, new venture feasibility, personal growth goals, new market entry, Go To market strategies, portfolio management and strategic trade-off assessment, organizational restructuring, etc.
SWOT Objectives / Importance of SWOT Analysis and SWOT Matrix
SWOT analysis of Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning using facts provided in Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) case study
2. Improving business portfolio management of Nurturing Green
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in Leadership & Managing People field.
4. Making a Leadership & Managing People topic specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Nurturing Green
Strengths Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Nurturing Green in Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) Harvard Business Review case study are -
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Nurturing Green has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in, as mentioned in case study Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) - staying ahead in the industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Nurturing Green in the sector have low bargaining power. Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Nurturing Green to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Nurturing Green has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive segment. Secondly the value chain collaborators of the firm in Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) HBR case study have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Diverse revenue streams
– Nurturing Green is present in almost all the verticals within the industry. This has provided firm in Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) case study a diverse revenue stream that has helped it to survive disruptions such as global pandemic in Covid-19, financial disruption of 2008, and supply chain disruption of 2021.
Ability to recruit top talent
– Nurturing Green is one of the leading recruiters in the industry. Managers in the Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) are in a position to attract the best talent available. The firm has a robust talent identification program that helps in identifying the brightest.
High brand equity
– Nurturing Green has strong brand awareness and brand recognition among both - the exiting customers and potential new customers. Strong brand equity has enabled Nurturing Green to keep acquiring new customers and building profitable relationship with both the new and loyal customers.
High switching costs
– The high switching costs that Nurturing Green has built up over years in its products and services combo offer has resulted in high retention of customers, lower marketing costs, and greater ability of the firm to focus on its customers.
Analytics focus
– Nurturing Green is putting a lot of focus on utilizing the power of analytics in business decision making. This has put it among the leading players in the industry. The technology infrastructure suggested by Deepak Pandit, Arun Sahay can also help it to harness the power of analytics for – marketing optimization, demand forecasting, customer relationship management, inventory management, information sharing across the value chain etc.
Digital Transformation in Leadership & Managing People segment
- digital transformation varies from industry to industry. For Nurturing Green digital transformation journey comprises differing goals based on market maturity, customer technology acceptance, and organizational culture. Nurturing Green has successfully integrated the four key components of digital transformation – digital integration in processes, digital integration in marketing and customer relationship management, digital integration into the value chain, and using technology to explore new products and market opportunities.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy in the Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) Harvard Business Review case study comprises – understanding the underlying the factors in the industry, building diversified operations across different geographies so that disruption in one part of the world doesn’t impact the overall performance of the firm, and integrating the various business operations and processes through its digital transformation drive.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Nurturing Green are driving operational speed, building greater agility, and keeping the organization nimble to compete with new competitors. It helps are organization to ideate new ideas, and execute them swiftly in the marketplace.
Strong track record of project management
– Nurturing Green is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
Weaknesses Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) are -
High bargaining power of channel partners
– Because of the regulatory requirements, Deepak Pandit, Arun Sahay suggests that, Nurturing Green is facing high bargaining power of the channel partners. So far it has not able to streamline the operations to reduce the bargaining power of the value chain partners in the industry.
Slow to strategic competitive environment developments
– As Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) HBR case study mentions - Nurturing Green takes time to assess the upcoming competitions. This has led to missing out on atleast 2-3 big opportunities in the industry in last five years.
Skills based hiring
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Nurturing Green has created an environment where the organization is dominated by functional specialists rather than management generalist. This has resulted into product oriented approach rather than marketing oriented approach or consumers oriented approach.
Ability to respond to the competition
– As the decision making is very deliberative, highlighted in the case study Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C), in the dynamic environment Nurturing Green has struggled to respond to the nimble upstart competition. Nurturing Green has reasonably good record with similar level competitors but it has struggled with new entrants taking away niches of its business.
Workers concerns about automation
– As automation is fast increasing in the segment, Nurturing Green needs to come up with a strategy to reduce the workers concern regarding automation. Without a clear strategy, it could lead to disruption and uncertainty within the organization.
Slow to harness new channels of communication
– Even though competitors are using new communication channels such as Instagram, Tiktok, and Snap, Nurturing Green is slow explore the new channels of communication. These new channels of communication mentioned in marketing section of case study Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) can help to provide better information regarding products and services. It can also build an online community to further reach out to potential customers.
High dependence on existing supply chain
– The disruption in the global supply chains because of the Covid-19 pandemic and blockage of the Suez Canal illustrated the fragile nature of Nurturing Green supply chain. Even after few cautionary changes mentioned in the HBR case study - Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C), it is still heavily dependent upon the existing supply chain. The existing supply chain though brings in cost efficiencies but it has left Nurturing Green vulnerable to further global disruptions in South East Asia.
High cash cycle compare to competitors
Nurturing Green has a high cash cycle compare to other players in the industry. It needs to shorten the cash cycle by 12% to be more competitive in the marketplace, reduce inventory costs, and be more profitable.
Capital Spending Reduction
– Even during the low interest decade, Nurturing Green has not been able to do capital spending to the tune of the competition. This has resulted into fewer innovations and company facing stiff competition from both existing competitors and new entrants who are disrupting the industry using digital technology.
Lack of clear differentiation of Nurturing Green products
– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, Nurturing Green needs to provide more differentiated products than what it is currently offering in the marketplace.
Compensation and incentives
– The revenue per employee as mentioned in the HBR case study Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C), is just above the industry average. Nurturing Green needs to redesign the compensation structure and incentives to increase the revenue per employees. Some of the steps that it can take are – hiring more specialists on project basis, etc.
Opportunities Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities highlighted in the Harvard Business Review case study Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) are -
Manufacturing automation
– Nurturing Green can use the latest technology developments to improve its manufacturing and designing process in Leadership & Managing People segment. It can use CAD and 3D printing to build a quick prototype and pilot testing products. It can leverage automation using machine learning and artificial intelligence to do faster production at lowers costs, and it can leverage the growth in satellite and tracking technologies to improve inventory management, transportation, and shipping.
Better consumer reach
– The expansion of the 5G network will help Nurturing Green to increase its market reach. Nurturing Green will be able to reach out to new customers. Secondly 5G will also provide technology framework to build new tools and products that can help more immersive consumer experience and faster consumer journey.
Lowering marketing communication costs
– 5G expansion will open new opportunities for Nurturing Green in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the Leadership & Managing People segment, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Building a culture of innovation
– managers at Nurturing Green can make experimentation a productive activity and build a culture of innovation using approaches such as – mining transaction data, A/B testing of websites and selling platforms, engaging potential customers over various needs, and building on small ideas in the Leadership & Managing People segment.
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Nurturing Green to conduct training and development for its employees across the world. This will result in not only reducing the cost of training but also help employees in different part of the world to integrate with the headquarter work culture, ethos, and standards.
Low interest rates
– Even though inflation is raising its head in most developed economies, Nurturing Green can still utilize the low interest rates to borrow money for capital investment. Secondly it can also use the increase of government spending in infrastructure projects to get new business.
Using analytics as competitive advantage
– Nurturing Green has spent a significant amount of money and effort to integrate analytics and machine learning into its operations in the sector. This continuous investment in analytics has enabled, as illustrated in the Harvard case study Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) - to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Nurturing Green to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.
Loyalty marketing
– Nurturing Green has focused on building a highly responsive customer relationship management platform. This platform is built on in-house data and driven by analytics and artificial intelligence. The customer analytics can help the organization to fine tune its loyalty marketing efforts, increase the wallet share of the organization, reduce wastage on mainstream advertising spending, build better pricing strategies using personalization, etc.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, Nurturing Green is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) case study suggests that firm can utilize new technology to build more coordinated teams and streamline operations and communications using tools such as CAD, Zoom, etc.
Identify volunteer opportunities
– Covid-19 has impacted working population in two ways – it has led to people soul searching about their professional choices, resulting in mass resignation. Secondly it has encouraged people to do things that they are passionate about. This has opened opportunities for businesses to build volunteer oriented socially driven projects. Nurturing Green can explore opportunities that can attract volunteers and are consistent with its mission and vision.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Nurturing Green can leverage digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate the production process, customer analytics to get better insights into consumer behavior, realtime digital dashboards to get better sales tracking, logistics and transportation, product tracking, etc.
Changes in consumer behavior post Covid-19
– Consumer behavior has changed in the Leadership & Managing People industry because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of this behavior will stay once things get back to normal. Nurturing Green can take advantage of these changes in consumer behavior to build a far more efficient business model. For example consumer regular ordering of products can reduce both last mile delivery costs and market penetration costs. Nurturing Green can further use this consumer data to build better customer loyalty, provide better products and service collection, and improve the value proposition in inflationary times.
Reconfiguring business model
– The expansion of digital payment system, the bringing down of international transactions costs using Bitcoin and other blockchain based currencies, etc can help Nurturing Green to reconfigure its entire business model. For example it can used blockchain based technologies to reduce piracy of its products in the big markets such as China. Secondly it can use the popularity of e-commerce in various developing markets to build a Direct to Customer business model rather than the current Channel Heavy distribution network.
Threats Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats mentioned in the HBR case study Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) are -
High dependence on third party suppliers
– Nurturing Green high dependence on third party suppliers can disrupt its processes and delivery mechanism. For example -the current troubles of car makers because of chip shortage is because the chip companies started producing chips for electronic companies rather than car manufacturers.
Increasing international competition and downward pressure on margins
– Apart from technology driven competitive advantage dilution, Nurturing Green can face downward pressure on margins from increasing competition from international players. The international players have stable revenue in their home market and can use those resources to penetrate prominent markets illustrated in HBR case study Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) .
Consumer confidence and its impact on Nurturing Green demand
– There is a high probability of declining consumer confidence, given – high inflammation rate, rise of gig economy, lower job stability, increasing cost of living, higher interest rates, and aging demography. All the factors contribute to people saving higher rate of their income, resulting in lower consumer demand in the industry and other sectors.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Nurturing Green has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Leadership & Managing People industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Nurturing Green needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Leadership & Managing People sector. According to Mckinsey study top managers believe that the adoption of technology in operations, communications is 20-25 times faster than what they planned in the beginning of 2019.
Regulatory challenges
– Nurturing Green needs to prepare for regulatory challenges as consumer protection groups and other pressure groups are vigorously advocating for more regulations on big business - to reduce inequality, to create a level playing field, to product data privacy and consumer privacy, to reduce the influence of big money on democratic institutions, etc. This can lead to significant changes in the Leadership & Managing People industry regulations.
Aging population
– As the populations of most advanced economies are aging, it will lead to high social security costs, higher savings among population, and lower demand for goods and services in the economy. The household savings in US, France, UK, Germany, and Japan are growing faster than predicted because of uncertainty caused by pandemic.
Capital market disruption
– During the Covid-19, Dow Jones has touched record high. The valuations of a number of companies are way beyond their existing business model potential. This can lead to capital market correction which can put a number of suppliers, collaborators, value chain partners in great financial difficulty. It will directly impact the business of Nurturing Green.
Trade war between China and United States
– The trade war between two of the biggest economies can hugely impact the opportunities for Nurturing Green in the Leadership & Managing People industry. The Leadership & Managing People industry is already at various protected from local competition in China, with the rise of trade war the protection levels may go up. This presents a clear threat of current business model in Chinese market.
Backlash against dominant players
– US Congress and other legislative arms of the government are getting tough on big business especially technology companies. The digital arm of Nurturing Green business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, etc.
Shortening product life cycle
– it is one of the major threat that Nurturing Green is facing in Leadership & Managing People sector. It can lead to higher research and development costs, higher marketing expenses, lower customer loyalty, etc.
Environmental challenges
– Nurturing Green needs to have a robust strategy against the disruptions arising from climate change and energy requirements. EU has identified it as key priority area and spending 30% of its 880 billion Euros European post Covid-19 recovery funds on green technology. Nurturing Green can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Leadership & Managing People industry.
Technology disruption because of hacks, piracy etc
– The colonial pipeline illustrated, how vulnerable modern organization are to international hackers, miscreants, and disruptors. The cyber security interruption, data leaks, etc can seriously jeopardize the future growth of the organization.
Instability in the European markets
– European Union markets are facing three big challenges post Covid – expanded balance sheets, Brexit related business disruption, and aggressive Russia looking to distract the existing security mechanism. Nurturing Green will face different problems in different parts of Europe. For example it will face inflationary pressures in UK, France, and Germany, balance sheet expansion and demand challenges in Southern European countries, and geopolitical instability in the Eastern Europe.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers in the HBR case study Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) needs to zero down on the relative importance of each factor mentioned in the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants.
We can provide the relative importance to each factor by assigning relative weights. Weighted SWOT analysis process is a three stage process –
First stage for doing weighted SWOT analysis of the case study Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) is to rank the strengths and weaknesses of the organization. This will help you to assess the most important strengths and weaknesses of the firm and which one of the strengths and weaknesses mentioned in the initial lists are marginal and can be left out.
Second stage for conducting weighted SWOT analysis of the Harvard case study Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) is to give probabilities to the external strategic factors thus better understanding the opportunities and threats arising out of macro environment changes and developments.
Third stage of constructing weighted SWOT analysis of Nurturing Green: The Growth Dilemma (C) is to provide strategic recommendations includes – joining likelihood of external strategic factors such as opportunities and threats to the internal strategic factors – strengths and weaknesses. You should start with external factors as they will provide the direction of the overall industry. Secondly by joining probabilities with internal strategic factors can help the company not only strategic fit but also the most probably strategic trade-off that Nurturing Green needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.
