documented翻译
针对一个公司的真正的核心竞争力外文翻译
外文翻译
Targeting a Company's Real Core Competencies
Material Source: Journal of Business Strategy, 1993 volume13 issue 6  Author: Amy V. Snyder and H. William Ebeling, Jr.
The twin concepts of core competence and business processes figure prominently in most discussions of corporate strategy. The core competence concept helps top managers answer the fundamental question "What should we do?" and the business processes perspective addresses the question "How should we do it?"
Both concepts are indispensable in guiding firms to achieve enduring competitive advantage and superior profitability, and both are founded on a simple notion: that the firm is a system of activities, not a portfolio of individual products or services. Some activities are performed so much better than the competition and are so critical to end products or services that they can be described as core competencies. When a series of activities are organized into a system that works better than the sum of i
ts parts, this business process can also create competitive advantage, even if component activities by themselves do not.
While business process reengineers have achieved significant
success in decreasing costs while simultaneously improving service levels, relatively few firms claim to have correctly identified and fully exploited  their core competencies or key activities. Throughout this article, we will use the terms core competency and key activity interchangeably. Business process reengineers have developed an analytically rigorous discipline that can be systematically applied and plainly communicated to others. For the core competency concept to achieve this same success, it must be linked to the underlying business economics that drive competitive advantage, and it must be applied in the same systematic manner as the business process concept.
In the mid-1970s, corporate planners began to question whether the product-centered business unit was the most appropriate unit of strategic analysis. In work undertaken for a global chemical company in 1977, Braxton Associates redefined the unit of analysis from product-centered business units to activities and developed insights about how competitive advantage is created in the long run.
In the course of our work with the chemical company, we demonstrated that gaining a strong relative s
hare in key value-added activities is more relevant to competitive position than gaining share of the related product market. In the 1970s, we used the slicing knife schematic to demonstrate that assessing competitive advantage from a product perspective can lead to erroneous conclusions. The insight that
underlies the activity perspective is that a firm can not be viewed only as a collection of individual products or services this merely describes the revenue-generating side of the firm. Equally important, the firm is a system of activities that must be organized and managed to imize the value of its offerings while minimizing their cost that is, to create competitive advantage.
The slicing knife example makes an important point, but a key question remains. Once it is determined that a firm enjoys a comparatively strong activity position, the next logical question is "So what?" Achieving strong activity position is critical to competitiveness only when the particular activity adds significant value to the end product or service.
In the 1980s, Michael Porter documented the concept of the value chain and used it to show how a series of activities could be viewed as a system designed to create competitive advantagePorter's work was instrumental in popularizing the activity perspective and the importance of activity linkages 
However, the popular version of Porter's value chain does not consider the value-added concept in sufficient depth. This is unfortunate,because the value-added structure determines which activities are critical to success and which are not.
It is usually a mistake to invest heavily in activities that represent only a small fraction of the overall value of a firm's products
or services. The company that produced the page you are now reading would be better off with a competency in printing and page setup than in packaging, even though the printed journal was delivered in a protective package, because packaging does not represent a significant fraction of the overall value of the delivered journal.
FOUR IMPERATIVES OF CORE COMPETENCIES
The GE and Honda examples demonstrate the importance of organizing around "real" core competencies or activities and the implications of failing to do so. Once senior management develops the strategic intent to identify, nurture, and organize around activities that can be made unique and enduring, a few rules must be followed to transform this commitment into competitive success.
Rule 1: Avoid laundry lists
If senior management settles on more than a handful of key activities or core competencies, it is probably over-reaching and certainly ignoring the intent of the word core. Many successful companies have targeted either one or two key activities Identifying key activities is one of the most important contributions senior management can make. In our view, proposed core competencies should:    Contribute significantly to the ultimate value of the end product or service.
Represent a unique capability that provides enduring competitive
advantage Have the potential to support multiple end products or services Rule 2: Achieve senior management consensus on core competencies What business are you really in?
Evaluating potential core competencies using the previously described screening approach is a necessary but insufficient step in building a competency driven organization. If competencies are to be nurtured and shared widely throughout the firm, senior management must reach consensus on which these are and act on the results of their selection process  In working to build senior management consensus on key activities, we have achieved good results using the following approaches among others:
Activity-based benchmarking.
Employee and asset distribution.
"What if" scenario development.
Activity-based benchmarking is a technique that can steer debate away from subjective opinions and toward hard facts. For example, if the vice president of operations claims that order processing and fulfillment is a core competency, he could develop a persuasive argument by demonstrating an enduring competitive advantage in order processing speed, cost, and customer satisfaction.
A compelling argument can also be built by answering some simple questions about an organization's internal configuration, for example:

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