A Renowned Corporation Apple Incorporated - Term Paper Example

Apple Incorporated Abstract A renowned corporation in the world, Apple Incorporated created a vibrant dominance in its industry due to its important HR approaches prior to the achievement of its strategic initiatives. In this paper, the proponent tries to compare and contrast how the HR approaches emphasized by top management of Apple Incorporated match up with the strategic initiatives of the said organization. It is found that the optimization of Apple’s competitive advantage was made possible by combining competitive culture and freedom of expression within the human resource. This resulted to the emancipation of highly effective core values on top of corporate culture that is well defined. Keywords: strategic initiative, competitive advantage, human resource Introduction Apple Incorporated is a renowned corporation not only in its industry but around the world. It cannot be denied that its vibrant dominance in its industry today is just an upshot of the late Steven Jobs’ initiative to create substantial opportunity for the company by starting everything from the bottom line, the human resource. In this paper, the proponent tries to compare and contrast how the HR approaches emphasized by top management of Apple Incorporated match up with the strategic initiatives of the said organization. Background Competitive advantage of Apple Incorporated is the result of its technological innovation. However, it is important to know how this company started this innovative move. In its case, everything should start from the inception of the product based on a potential idea down to the actual product development and distribution strategy. As implied, there is a remarkable inclusion of combining high calibrated and modern approach in production and marketing activities. However, in these activities there is a high involvement of the human resource. Apple Incorporated is a renowned company due its capacity to create a need for its product and service offerings. This capacity is tantamount to its ability to produce new innovative offerings in the market today and in the future. Regarding this, the company needs to substantially ensure that its corporate objectives are met and even momentarily addressed. However, there are important moves that need to be considered prior to addressing its strategic goals. One of these considerations is its human resource. HR approach and strategic initiative From the moment Jobs decided to make a difference at Apple Incorporated, it was his primary concern to investigate further on the human resource. For Jobs, there are many important things that need to be addressed in order to achieve whatever it is that a certain company wants to obtain in the future. All of these could be possible by maximizing the human resource. At Apple Incorporated, personnel are encouraged to come up with highly innovative output (The New York Times, 2011). Jobs just wanted to bring the best out from the human resource. In this way, competence was a remarkable form of culture that was developed within the human resource of the company (O’Grady, 2008). With this culture, personnel have to be considered capable to create bright ideas just to come up with highly differentiated and innovative product offerings. At Apple Incorporated, competence was completely defined. Each personnel need to compete with each other, but in a positive way just for the sake of achieving what would be highly differentiated and innovative product offerings. As a result, Apple Incorporated never wasted time to always find something new and something better for the target market. In fact, from time to time the company tries to promote best products that in reality were noteworthy outputs of the best and brightest hired human resource. Furthermore, Jobs emphasized a strong, but fair recognition of individual talent and creativity under his management, which significantly continues today due to its positive result in obtaining the company’s competitive advantage. This competitive advantage is its strategic initiative in order to obtain considerable market share and continue its operation. However, as healthy competition was encouraged within the team, concern on internal conflict was also substantially addressed by giving every member of the team the freedom of expression and denouncing competition through personal traits and behaviors (Dubrin, 2011; O’Grady, 2008). This freedom of expression was instituted for the benefit of the organization especially on giving equal chance and opportunity for individual to be more creative and come up with high valuable products that would make sense. Addressing personal traits and behaviors helps members feel they are integral components of group of people producing products that are “outrageously good” (Dubrin, 2011, p. 287). At Apple Incorporated, it is evident that competition and freedom of expression within the human resource result to the achievement of highly differentiated product and service offerings. These HR approaches have widely contributed to its success today. However, these two might probably also result to the formation of internal conflicts, due to the fact that individual competition substantially involves personal desires and motives in the same way as freedom of expression which is also primarily self-centered at some point. However, these two specific approaches have been integrated together as one, making them contrasting at some point based on the human resource perception, but when united would both compliment each other in the achievement of Apple’s strategic initiatives. Jobs was able to see to it that technological advantage should pave the way for the creation of appropriate corporate culture. In fact, there are existing technological opportunities at Apple Incorporated. However, these chances need to be associated with the corporate culture (Solvay & Sanglier, 1998, p.463). As a result, Jobs was able to ensure that the entire transformation especially on the company’s strategic initiative was generally created within the bound of human resource having its control within corporate culture. As a result, it has become part of the company’s core values to view each output with equal excellence in order to fairly acknowledge each personnel. However, among of these excellent outputs, those that meet best the required standard and organization’s strategic initiatives would be given with high favor. In other words, one of the strategic initiatives of Apple Incorporated is to come up with highly differentiated products that would find their way in the market with high level of acceptance. In this initiative and in the case of Apple, it is guaranteed that each created product offering would find its potential market value due to the point that it is highly differentiated and innovative. In the case of personal computers industry, in which Apple is an integral part of it, this integration would make sense, but it does not only require technological revolution and advancement. Above all, there is a human resource that needs to be tapped for this concern on top of a highly defined corporate culture. Conclusion It is noted that Jobs, under his management, significantly made a distinction at Apple Incorporated especially on giving great level of importance on the human resource. It is commonly heard that the human resource is one of the best assets that organizations could potentially have. This specific principle remarkably resulted to how Jobs wanted to maximize the full potential of each personnel at Apple Incorporated. This optimization was made possible by combining competitive culture and freedom of expression within the human resource. Although, quite contrasting, this resulted to the emancipation of highly effective core values on top of corporate culture that is well defined. References Dubrin, A. J. (2011). Essentials of Management. Mason, Ohio: Cengage Learning. O’Grady, J. D. (2008). Apple Incorporated. Westpoint, Connecticut: ABC-CLIO. Solvay, J., & Sanglier, M. (1998). A model of the growth of corporate productivity. International Business Review. 7, 463-481. The New York Times. (2011). Apple Incorporated. 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