Global Strategic Management

Chapter 1 : Strategic Management

Strategic management is essential for a company to create and maintain competitive advantages in the marketplace. It depends upon analysis, decisions, and actions that create unique advantages. Strategic management focuses on short-term and long-term organizational goals while recognizing necessary trade-offs between efficacy and efficiency. Therefore, strategic management depends heavily on the goals of the organization, as well as who is involved in setting goals or making decisions.

Nordstrom, Inc. is a popular fashion retailer for women, men, and children. The US-based company operates three retailers: Nordstrom, Nordstrom Local, and Nordstrom Rack. It includes both in-store and online retail. As with many department store retailers, such as Macy’s, Nordstrom experienced significant decrease in sales due to increased competition from online retailers like Amazon. While previously a publicly traded company for 53 years, Nordstrom finalized a $6.25 billion deal in May of 2025 for private acquisition by the Nordstrom Family and El Puerto de Liverpool. This decision allows the company more decision-making authority without pressure from investors; however, the deal created significant debt for the company.

August 30, 2025

Chapter 2 : External Environment

Success of a company depends upon both internal operations and awareness of the external environment. Successful management and strategy requires continued analysis of threats and opportunities within the company’s external environment from existing and future competitors. Overall, awareness of the external environment involves environmental scanning, monitoring, and competitive intelligence of industry rivals. This helps to develop projections of future market change. Managers must also consider the competitive environment created by competitors, suppliers, and customers.

As a clothing retailer, Nordstrom Inc. exists in a highly competitive and volatile industry. The company experiences significant threat from new entrants and substitute products or services. The largest industry competition comes from the increase in online clothing retailers offering discounted prices and faster delivery services. While Nordstrom offers online services, it experiences significant threat from the substitute products offered on Amazon or the entrance of newer online retailers, such as Zara. Additionally, the vast availability of clothing retailers offering similar products creates significant bargaining power from buyers. However, Nordstrom markets as a retailer offering high-end and high-quality brands allowing the company to maintain some buyer-control. Additionally, Nordstrom Inc. provides the same products within three different retail models: Nordstrom, Nordstrom Local, and Nordstrom Rack. The original Nordstrom model operates a luxury-department store both in-person and online. Alternatively, Nordstrom Rack operates as a discount store selling overstock or past-season clothing both in-store and online. Nordstrom Local are smaller, boutique stores offering additional services, such as personal styling and alterations. Overall, Nordstrom exists in an industry of significant change dependent upon awareness of its external environment for success.

September 6, 2025

Chapter 3: Internal Environment

Equally important to analysis of the external environment, companies must analyze their internal environment for competitive advantage. A few main ways the internal environment can be assessed include value-chain analysis, resource-based analysis, and financial ratio analysis. Uniquely, the resource-based analysis combines both internal and external analysis to evaluate the competitive advantage of a company’s resources.

Resource-based analysis considers three main forms of resources: tangible and intangible resources and organizational capabilities. An analysis of Nordstrom’s tangible resources yields varying evidence. As the company recently became a private company, it incurred significant debt affecting its financial resources. However, the company continues to increase its physical resources as many new store locations continue to open. Similarly, analysis of intangible assets varies between the three different store types. As culture and reputation of Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack locations remains similar to other clothing stores on the market. However, Nordstrom Local possesses unique intangible resources in employee skills and reputation. Overall, Nordstrom’s resource are valuable, as trending, brand-name clothing is desired by consumers. However, it remains easily imitated by other clothing retailers making the resource easily imitated and less rare. Both an external and internal review reveal significant competition with minimal competitive advantage.

September 13, 2025

Chapter 4: Intellectual Assets

In addition to understanding a company’s tangible assets, intellectual capital or intangible assets are essential for a company’s continued growth and success. Intellectual capital involves attracting and retaining human capital, which is the talent and knowledge of employees. It also involves social capital, which are the social connections throughout a firm. This means firms not only need talented employees, but also need connections between the employees. Together, human capital and social capital build the success of a company through its intellectual capital.

As a clothing retailer, Nordstrom minimally relies on explicit knowledge and relies heavily on the tacit knowledge of employees for sales, advertising, and product selection. When hiring employees for their salesforce, Nordstrom benefits from employees talented in persuasion, conflict management, and product knowledge. These are not easy skills to master and often leads to frequent employee turnover from poor performance or employee burnout. Additionally, Nordstrom attempts to improve social capital by hosting regional events for employees and frequent promotions within the company. Altogether, Nordstrom works to hire employees with clothing retail knowledge and attempts to maintain these employees through awards, bonuses, and promotions.

September 20, 2025

Chapter 5: Business-Level Strategy

Establishing and maintaining a competitive advantage requires continuous supply of customer-valued products or services while following a cost-effective structure. Competitive advantage is temporary assets. As trends change and new competitive products enter the market, companies are always at risk of losing their competitive advantage. Furthermore, the present stage of the industry life-cycle can greatly affect the product demand, growth rate, and value-creating strategies.

As a clothing-retailer, Nordstrom Inc. is heavily influenced by the industry life-cycle. It is affected by larger industry changes, such as the introduction of online retail, and the smaller changes associated with evolving fashion trends or seasonal changes. For example, the clothing industry is currently in the growth stage for fall seasonal clothing. In this stage, Nordstrom’s primary strategy is differentiation from competitor products by marketing. In the previous Introduction stage, it prioritized differentiation by research for product and brand selection. Now the company is focusing its attention on marketing its fall products as high-end, quality clothing at a lower cost than high-end department stores. Overall, Nordstrom must consistently evolve and adapt to industry changes to establish and maintain its competitive advantage.

September 27, 2025

Chapter 6: Corporate-Level Strategy

When considering diversification initiatives, the ultimate end-goal is creating value for shareholders through planned mergers, internal development, acquisitions or strategic alliances. To estimate this pay-off the corporation must consider how to jointly manage the businesses and what businesses the corporation should enter. In terms of Nordstrom, there are two main elements of their business strategy that relate to this chapter. The first being Nordstrom’s business layout of three different style stores with different products, services, and consumers. The second being the recent acquisition of Nordstrom in May 2025 taking the company private after decades as a publicly traded company. The Nordstrom family entered the acquisition following poor company stock performance to make strategic changes for the company without public market input. It completed this acquisition with the help of a major department store retailer based out of Mexico City, El Puerto de Liverpool. The company has a diversified portfolio of retail stores outside of the United States providing new insight and expertise for Nordstrom.

October 5, 2025

Chapter 7: International Strategy

When firms diversify abroad, they must constantly make strategic decisions to achieve competitive advantages within a global marketplace. This creates great variety in supply, demand, and competition for the firm in each market. However, the most successful firms in global markets first succeeded in home markets by strategic advancement. Nordstrom currently only operates stores within the United States after closing its last Canadian stores in 2023; however, it offers online retailing internationally. This minimal existence in the global market limits the company’s market size and growth potential, but it avoids the economic risks associated with entering a global market. As a department clothing retail, it is difficult for Nordstrom to differentiate its products and services to create an advantage. This makes it difficult for Nordstrom to enter the global marketplace and create a strategic advantage

October 11, 2025

Chapter 8: Entrepreneurial Strategy

For a company to grow and expand, firms must often rely on entrepreneurial strategy to enter into new markets and compete with the response from existing firms. This involves an opportunity to enter the market, resources and an entrepreneurial team willing to pursue the project. Then it requires a successful strategy to enter and compete within the market. This requires evaluating entry barriers and consideration of potential retaliation from existing companies. Often this entry barrier can be accomplished by product differentiation or low-cost strategies. Similarly, market competition strategy can be developed by evaluating current competition on the market and responding to the threat as needed.

Nordstrom began as in independent shoe store in 1907, and it became the largest independent shoe store chain in the nation by the 1930s. By the 1960s, the Nordstrom sons began looking for new opportunities for growth and expansion. The company purchased Best’s Apparel, a Seattle-based clothing store, to make its entry into clothing in 1963. Ten years later Nordstrom was considered the West Coast’s largest volume specialty store. Now Nordstrom is primarily recognized as a clothing-retailer with many customers surprised to learn the company sells shoes or that the company originated as a shoe retailer. The decision by the Nordstrom sons in the 1960s catapulted the success of the company, but the decision relied both on the opportunity to acquire Best’s Apparel and strategic response from existing market competition.

October 18, 2025

Chapter 9: Strategic Control

Previous chapters have discussed the importance of strategic decision-making. From analyzing the external environment to retention of intellectual assets, strategic decisions are essential for a firm’s continued success. However, it is equally important to assess the individuals making those decisions. Strategic control evaluates the firm’s response to environmental changes, its culture and its boundaries. The company’s organizational culture defines the company and companies must strive to maintain an effective culture. Nordstrom Inc. built its culture as a family-owned business and recently reclaimed that identity by going private. Additionally, a culture can be encouraged by rewards or incentives. Nordstrom Inc. demonstrates an example of this by rewarding employees with a significant store discount with the potential for an increased discount awarded for sales performance. In these ways, Nordstrom is making strategic decisions to improve upon its established culture.

October 24, 2025

Chapter 10: Organizational Designs

Success of an organization depends upon both establishment of an organizational structure and permeability of the established structure. Structure creates the balance that allows for effective communication and utilization of resources. As corporations establish and grow, they must also establish and grow their structure. Nordstrom Inc follows a functional structure constructed by major functions within the company. As Nordstrom operates as three different style stores, the functional structure creates uniformity and effective communication across stores. However, it is likely also holding the various store styles back from the diversified operations divisional or matrix structure would offer. Additionally, Nordstrom operates by an inverted pyramid model with customers at the top and board of directors at the bottom. This structure further identifies the company’s priorities and works to establish boundaries within the company.

November 1, 2025

Chapter 11: Strategic Leadership

In continuing with a similar theme to organizational structure, strategic and successful leadership are essential to the survival of any organization. Successful leaders must simultaneously define, design, and maintain the direction of the organization. Additionally, as new leaders rise and fall, there must be continual direction provided. This is an interesting element to examine within Nordstrom Inc., as the company started as and largely remains a family-owned business. Key leadership roles, such as CEO, for this large organization depend upon familial connection with the company passed down through generations of the Nordstrom family. In this way, Nordstrom has largely maintained its same vision, direction, and culture from continuity of leadership.

November 7, 2025

Chapter 12: Managing Innovation

For a firm to grow and advance, strategic leaders must successfully manage change and innovation. Currently, the largest sources of change and innovation come from technology for both product and process advancements. Organizations must keep up with trends and changes in the marketplace but also innovate to create a competitive advantage. Organizations can accomplish this by developing a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. A primary way Nordstrom Inc. creates a culture of innovation and growth is by a decentralized management style. This allows local store managers to have significant control and input on the direction of their stores. Therefore, stores managers are able to adapt products and services offered at individual stores to the needs and demands of their local customers. Rather than all stores offering the same clothing styles and products, stores can vary their products based upon the trends of its location. Overall, the decentralized management style encourages corporate entrepreneurship and innovation.

November 14, 2025