What Is a Successful Organization?
Success from a personal perspective has different meanings to different individuals. One needs to define their version of success. Personally, success means going for what you want, be it in business or life. Success can also be in achieving goals and objectives or a progression in a career or life. Professional success has a completely different meaning to professional accomplishments. Accomplishments in the professional perspective are in the form of achieving desirable professions and careers, job titles, or better pay. Professional success, on the other hand, refers to factors like finding joy in one’s life and career choices and achieving financial stability. Professional success depends on whether an individual feels happy and fulfilled in the type of career and profession they occupy.
An organization that continues to experience success in the United States is the Walmart corporation. This corporation entails several chains of hypermarkets, grocery stores and discount department stores. There are over ten thousand stores set up in different locations worldwide, providing employment to millions of employees and accumulating billions of dollars in assets. Sam Walton is the main founder of the Walmart stores around the year 1962 (Carden et al., 2021). The main aim of establishing these stores is to create a business model that still maintains low prices for all commodities on sale. The fact that the founder operates on a large scale, he was able to minimize costs. Even with many competitors in the market, profit margins in large scale businesses are high. Walmart provided many services to a diverse range of many customers; hence, the founder could negotiate for better prices from the suppliers of different commodities.
There are several factors that contribute to the success of the Walmart corporation. Walmart is one of the first businesses to take advantage of some advancements of technology, for example, the barcode system. The company took advantage of this technology in the early ’80s. The barcode system is a system that assists businesses to have a faster and efficient ring up of items using a series of bars or alphanumeric codes. The Walmart corporation uses this type of system to date to help with inventory by keeping track of goods in and out of the stores. This fact was one of the major contributors to its success over other competitors in the market. Walmart can consistently keep prices of commodities low by eliminating extra costs of middlemen and leveraging products directly from the manufacturers. This process is known as cross-docking. The stores are in a position where they are as close to the supply as possible to reduce transportation and labour expenses.
There are several parameters that businesses and organizations use to determine whether operations lead to successful results. The finance factor refers to the level of profits of the company. If the money left after the company caters for expenses in production is more than the initial investment, then it is considered a profit. Apart from finance, other factors like the customer base can determine success of businesses (Choshin & Ghaffari, 2017). A business that can keep existing customers, attain referrals, and still get positive results in a new customer base is bound to be successful. Sales indicators are factors that determine all sales between new customers, existing customers, and profits per sale. Finally, employees are a key part of an organization that can determine its success and failure. Successful companies indicate high records of high employee satisfaction. Employees who are comfortable with working conditions and other factors will work towards achieving the objectives and goals of the organization.
References
Carden, A., Courtemanche, C., & Harris, R. (2021). The vital two: Retail innovation by Sol price and Sam Walton. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3915813
Choshin, M., & Ghaffari, A. (2017). An investigation of the impact of effective factors on the success of e-Commerce in small- and medium-sized companies. Computers in Human Behavior, 66, 67-74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.09.026
Leave a Reply