针对一个公司的真正的核心竞争力外文翻译.docVIP

外文翻译 Targeting a Companys 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 its 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 uni