Potential Domestic and International Sources, Research Paper Example

Let’s Go Surfing Now wants to pursue the business venture of selling their Carabiners to the surfing customers in Australia. Before they move forward with this business venture they need to determine what potential domestic and international sources of financing available.In popular consciousness the USA, and specifically California, is attributed with the birth of surfing culture; however it is worth noting that surfing has a much longer, and fascinating history as a pre-Colonial body culture playing a pivotal role in Polynesia (men’s’ and interestingly also women’s’) cultural life (Alison, 2005, p. 155). Eighteenth and nineteenth century colonization by Europeans and Americans was to limit the activity; puritanical Americans missionaries thought that surfing was immoral and evil, so it was banned (p. 156). In the early twentieth century it was revived, predominantly by non-indigenous “Haole” (white) Hawaiian settlers (p. 157). The picture is clearly complex, and an area that requires detailed research; however, I will offer some insights based on potentials international and national sources of investment for Let’s Go Surfing Now.

The study of surf style is also informing in illustrating that the influence of global commodity culture is neither fixed nor unchallenged; furthermore, that at the economic level, regional and national industries challenge the stronghold of the international and transnational corporations. Transnational and international companies like Quicksilver are important players in the industry, their sphere of influence via sponsorship, the production of sport videos and other sub-cultural resources is key (Alison, 2005, p. 162).  Yet alongside these corporations are regionally based cottage industries that co-exist, and in some cases dominate, the production of material goods and services. Booth likewise recognizes the enduring prevalence of small, flexible “artisans” in the making of equipment, accessories, films and magazines in Australia (Booth, 2005, p. 24).

As the world’s only island continent, Australia has more beaches per head of population than any other large and mass. Edwards et al (2003, p. 24) tell that all the capital cities, save government-created Canberra, are port cities. And all these cities have a plentiful supply of beaches nearby. Sydney and Perth, facing the pacific and Indian oceans, have surf beaches literally at their doorstep. Brisbane and Melbourne are built around huge, sandy bas, while Adelaide faces a gulf (Edwards, et al, 2003, p. 24).

In San Diego, it would be hard to escape that industry’s radiating strength. Like parts of Hawaii and Australia, San Diego and the forty-five-mile stretch of coastline north to “Surf City” Huntington Beach centers the global surf trade (Corner, 2010, p. 193). Quicksilver, Huntington Beach’s second largest employer (with seven hundred employees) after Boeing, has its headquarters there (Corner, 2010, p. 193). The Huntington Beach Surfing Walk of Fame and the International Surf Museum at Huntington Beach do the work of institutionalizing surf history and archiving its memorabilia (p. 194). Surfline wave forecasting service is located here, and five Webcams provide continuous live feed of the surf-break, paying it more attention than any other place on the planet (Spearritt, 2000). The Surfrider Foundation, with sixty U.S. regional chapters and eight international branches in surf-heavy nations, has its home base just south of here in San Celemente, near Diego County’s northern border (Corner, 2010, p. 195).

In terms of fashion and the production of the surfer-girl look, this part of California is the absolute epicenter, and a girls’ localism that did not address this fact in some meaningful way would have not relevance (Corner, 2010, p. 196). But even claims of investment in fashion and commercial culture – in the tradition of the Queeen of Capitalism, Madonna – this investment is hardly gullible (p. 196).

At the more popular beaches most of surf clubs are now licensed, have gaming rooms and often gyms as well. They are overseen by powerful committees, usually more interested in the cash flow than the beach, and they have strict dress regulations. At Mooloolaba, for instance, men are not allowed in with sandals, although women can still enter with almost any imaginable footwear (Corner, 2010, p. 197). Such dress regulations attempt to turn beachside locales into sophisticated clubs. What is the point? They are now little different to a hotel or an RSL club. Some of the money is used for more sophisticated rescue equipment, but the bulk of it appears to be reinvested in further expansion of the cash cow facilities – bigger cellars, better gyms, more poker machines – all sited on crown and overlooking public beach (Corner, 2010, p. 199).

Over the summer holidays Australian coastal towns bloat with city families struggling to escape their work identities. The beach offers the promise of anonymity, equality and stress deferral – it is an atemporal haven for the urban fatigued. The media lathers itself in these clichés, work-shopping and post-shopping the sand and surf into a uniquely Australian version of paradise. This need for a unified sense of belonging, once personified in the bush hero, has shifted to the beach via a concerted effort to establish a user-friendly national identity for domestic and, more importantly, international audiences. Throughout this re-visioning, the bodies positioned on screen remain disturbingly uniform. The elasticity of flesh has always been problematic for the Australian media, driven as they are by a compulsion to erase the uneasiness of aging, illness, and excessive skin. While the high rating television series SEA Change (ABC) was a rare offering that bravely tackled age and difference in coastal life, it only survived three seasons partly due to a lack of overseas sales (Davidson, & Spearritt, 2000). Perhaps one has moved on since then – more business savvy but less visionary.

It is clear to Let’s Go Surging Now must take on and effectively challenge surf industry giants. Carabiners as a big business must be called out.The commercialization of the beaches in Australia proceeds at present almost unimpeded. Clubhouses everywhere are turning to gaming and other revenue sources. Their buildings take up more and more of the beach they institutionalize themselves into business proportions with a pastiche of volunteerism left to help market raffle tickets and retain a pseudo sense of community. This would be a great potential for Let’s Go Surfing Now’s investment in Australia.

Centralized or Decentralized

It appears that the surfingenabled business ventures to bridge their organizational boundaries, now a common place practice. Let’s Go Surfing Now, with employees serving in Australia, must have a centralized goal and mission that all employees can relate to and understand. Primarily, this company must decide what those shared values should be. The organizational strategy should move away from what is known, and develop towards what is unknown. Thereby, the organization should envelop a culture of entrepreneurial change that challenges the status quo. To do so, the emphasis should lend towards cross-functional involvement rather than top-down management. The shared values of Let’s Go Surfing Now can then become one of growth and opportunity. The impact to employees is the changes in communication and expectations.

Based on the analysis of Let’s Go Surfing Now, it is recommended that the organizational strategy towards corporate culture change towards an entrepreneurial leadership culture. Entrepreneurial leadership is a formal process that incorporates informal ideas. A large firm is often imbued with strategic processes and policies disseminated from a formal planning system, and a medium sized organization is often in flux between entrepreneurial and traditional formal strategies (Pearce and Robinson, 2004, p. 12).

The ‘growth perspective’ “allowsbusinesses to make the most of their scope to create enterprise-level value from actions relevant to human capital growth and to information management” (Kaplan and Norton, 2006, p. 105). The strategy for changing shared values towards an entrepreneurial culture is to develop the growth perspective by creating a vision of change that focuses on human development.

The Let’s Go Surfing Now’s staff should be involved in the processes that make the company works. The leader’s responsibility is to move from formal processing to incorporate informal ideas. This does not necessarily mean an increase in training and meetings, but that the ideals of those training and meetings should change. The concept is that bilateral management, where each employee has a valuable input in the training and meetings, is the focus. The business should encourage international improvement as well as inspire innovation and creation of new ideas in customer service. It is important then to develop change management strategies that focus on exploring vision, discipline and business goals within the industry. The entrepreneurial culture is the process of managing a growing organization’s culture while institutionalizing structural changes, with the impact of successful growth management. This means that organizations the consequence of an extremely formal organization has the consequence of diminishing innovation and necessary transformations to achieve a business goal both at domestic and international level.

To encompass consumer ideals into strategic management, Let’s Go Surfing Now should chart the strategy beginning with the current situation (Pearce and Robinson, 2004, p. 120). In this case, employees do not perceive there is motivation to create new ideas, and there is no support from management regarding resources for innovation. The charting should include barriers to the strategy, here, the exploration of the company culture and effect of top-down management on employee morale and innovation is recommended. The next component is to disseminate what core competencies are required to develop the resources—effectively, how does the hotel train people to become innovators? This means that “decision-makers, who arepassionate about their jobs as strategists was to recognize and weigh core competencies, and meetcomplexitywhile applying the concept because of the generalization of its level of analysis” (Pearce and Robinson, 2004, p. 133).

In the competitive surfing industry, strategic management must look beyond functionality and towards a support system for improvement, building up core competencies and information based skills. Breaking from the traditional mindset to incorporate a strategic plan that is focused on encouraging employees knowledge-based value often includes training, reward systems, and encouraging risk taking (Harrison and Enz,2005, p.45). The recommendation is to develop a process of training so that management will be able to understand how to encourage employees through rewards and motivation. This will reinforce positive new behaviors by establishing an acceptable initiative for growth and innovation in Australia. It is important to develop towards the characteristics of strategic management by stating the intent, in this case the intent is to encourage “commercial” thinking, that is comprehensive and opportunistic with long-term goals built on past experiences, present situations, and future possibilities (Harrison and Enz, 2005, p. 20).

Ellen Neuborne (2003, p. 26-31) presents guidelines for developing a culture of businesses.He (p. 30) explores the following steps in relation to developing an commercial culture:

1. Give Permission: Be open and be specific. Particularly if this is a new concept for your company, be clear and expect team to dream up and present creative ideas.
2. Set A System:Company needs some sort of mechanism to keep the ideas rolling. Decide in advance that they will meet once a week or once a month to talk about new ideas and how to implement them. Promote the system. Make sure everyone knows that they can pop into their office anytime with an idea or present it at the scheduled meeting.
3. Follow Up: Nothing is more demoralizing than presenting a great idea and watching it wither and die from a lack of support. Be sure to follow up on the most promising ones. If they do not, the flow of ideas is sure to dry up in a hurry.
4. Welcome Creative Ideas: Hold meetings with his sales and marketing staffers to ask them for ideas on business growth.
5. Work To Build Employee Loyalty: To retain top sales and marketing staffers, offer a variety of motivational programs.

Strategic management therefore must look at the short-term and long-standing goals by including employee growth and stating aplan of developing highly qualified and flexible personnel and, thus, providing steady service for a reduced number of personnel (Pearce and Robinson, 2004, p. 137). A practicalstatementexpects the requirements of employees and clients’ expectations through worker satisfaction, devotion and team vows. It is therefore recommended that a strategic management plan be implemented that is “acceptable, flexible, measurable over time, motivating, suitable, understandable, and achievable”.

References

Alison, Lincoln. (2005). The Global Politics of Sport: The Role of Global Institutions in Sport. Routledge, pp. 155-170.

Booth, Douglas. (2005). The field: Truth and Fiction in Sport History. Taylor & Francis. ISBN: 0415282276.

Corner, Krista. (2010). Surfer Girls in the New World Order. Duke University Press. ISBN: 9780822348054

Davidson, J., & Spearritt, P. (2000). Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since 1870. Melbourne University Press, Chapter 5.

Edwards, Allan, &Gilbert, Keith, &Skinner, James. (2003). Some Like it Hot: The Beach as a Cultural Dimension. Meyer & Meyer Verlag. ISBN: 9781841260983.

Harrison, Jeffrey and Enz, Cathy A. (2005).Hospitality Strategic Management, 1^sted. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. NY. ISBN : 0471478539

Kaplan, Jack and Norton, J. (2003).Patterns of Entrepreneurship, 1^st ed.John Wiley & Sons, Inc NY. ISBN : 0471203823

Neuborne, Ellen (2003 August). Bright Ideas. Sales & Marketing Management; Vol. 155 Issue 8, p26, 5p, 2c ISSN: 0163-7517

Pearce, Jack and Robinson, Richard (2004).Strategic Management: Formulation, Implementation, and Control, 9^thed. The McGraw-Hill Companies EAST, PATCHOGUE, NY, U.S.A ISBN : 007289024X

Spearritt, P. (2000). Sydney’s Century. Sydney: UNSW Press.