The Hindu Business Line : <I>Steeple chase </I>

You can think of environment at two levels, viz. general and task, write John Kew and John Stredwick in `Business Environment', from Jaico (www.jaicobooks.com) .

General environment, a.k.a. `societal', `macro' and `far', is about national culture, ideologies, scientific developments, level of education, global scene, legal and political processes, demographics, and such. Task environment encompasses `forces relevant to an individual organisation', such as `customers, suppliers, competitors, regulators, local labour market, and specific technologies'. The difference is not static, say the authors. "Elements in the general environment are continually breaking through to the task environment, and impacting on individual organisations."

Acronym-watchers know that PEST analysis is about political, economic, socio-cultural, and technological categories of environmental influences. PESTLE was a variation, with L for legal, and the final E for environment, reflecting an awareness of growing regulation and global warming. STEEPLE came up recently, to accommodate corporate social responsibility (CSR) and business ethics; the letters stand for social, technological, economic, environmental, political, legal and ethical.

A chapter on the competitive environment discusses Michael Porter's Five Forces model, for use `as the first stage of strategic analysis' to know where a firm stands in the industry. The model can tell you where you are now, and probably why you are there, but not how to get where you want to get, caution the authors. "There is also a danger in carrying out more and more detailed analysis - paralysis by analysis!"

One of the case studies in the book is about Indian call centres, included in a chapter titled `the international scene: the European Union and globalisation'. The authors inform that the call centre industry in the UK employs nearly 9 lakh people, or 3 per cent of the workforce. The book suggests that the long-run future of the UK call centre industry must lie with `developing a more sophisticated knowledge-based, value-added service,' even as `basic information-giving services' are performed in India.

The book wraps with a major case study on the beer industry in the UK. A happening area, again.A book that sensitises you to what's around!

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

D. Murali

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