Caterpillar
The history of Caterpillar started with it's founding in 1925. After WWI, its first European base, the Caterpillar Tractor Co. Ltd, was set up in Great Britain. This was the first of a long series of expansion in Europe and abroad to help manage foreign exchange shortages, tariffs, import controls and better serve customers around the world. In 1931, the company created a separate engine sales group to market diesel engines to other equipment manufacturers. This group was replaced in 1953 with a separate sales an marketing division to better serve the needs of a broad range of engine customers. Engine sales now account for approximately one-third of the company's total sales and revenue. In 1963 the United States company signed a joint venture with the Japanese Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. Caterpillar has managed to develop engines designed specifically for various applications, achieving considerable international success and widening its commercial horizons. Since 1985, the Caterpillar range of products has been widely diversified to meet the needs of a great variety of clients. Caterpillar has become one of the most impressive industrial giants on the international engine panorama. Working on different fronts, Caterpilla
Global competition rules of the game constantly change and a company has to accept an endless game of catch-up or adopt strategic intent3. Companies were seen to be leveraging resources to reach seemingly unattainable goals - as typified by Komatsu's 'encircling' of Caterpillar in the world-wide earth-moving machinery market. Caterpillar did not recruit MBAs as part of their strategy. Although it is not necessary for a company to succeed with an MBA, it would be beneficial if the company had more. As they were oblivious to the strategic intent and intangible advantages of their rivals, Caterpillar were caught off guard2. Global competition rules of the game are changing constantly and a company has to accept an endless game of catch-up or adopt strategic intent. The main focus of reviewing Caterpillar is to review the management of a global corporation. Caterpillar's strategy did not challenge the organization to systematically building new advantages. What characterized the rise of firms like Komatsu was 'strategic intent'; ambition out of all proportion to resources and capabilities, an obsession with winning, and a quest for global leadership. Hamel and Prahald also suggested that companies should invest a significant percentage of executive management's time to planning for the future. Hamel and Prahalad's assertion that competitiveness is born in the gap between a company's resources and its managers' goals, has entered the mainstream of strategy thinking. They calculated the threat posed by potential competitors in terms of their existing resources rather than their resourcefulness. Caterpillar had misinterpreted the strategic intent of the Japanese company. The theory that Hamel and Prahalad had about the necessity of genetic changes comes into play here.
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