I mentioned in the last part, the importance of understanding core competencies in terms of activities or actions. One thing that I like to do to try to help students understand this is to use English or grammar, whatever language it might be and you probably are familiar with the concept of verbs. When we talk about core competencies, we're going to use action words or verbs to describe what is the companies do that allows them to be successful. Let me try to explain. Think of a very successful athlete that you're familiar with, you might think of a soccer player in your country or in another country that is very good and very important to the success of the team. You might think of a basketball team, a cricket team, any sport that you're interested in. I'm going to use basketball to try to demonstrate what I'm talking about in terms of the importance of focusing on activities and verbs rather than static things like nouns that are just owned or possessed. Think of the basketball player, if you're not familiar with him, look him up, his name is Shaquille O'Neal. Shaq. Shaquille O'Neal is now retired from the NBA, the National Basketball Association in the United States. But for many years, he was one of the best players in basketball in the world. Shaquille O'Neal or Shaq had some very unique gifts. For one thing, he was tall. He was 7'3", I believe or 7'2". He was also thick. He was not a very thin person. He had strength and so those are two nouns, if you will or two things that he possessed. Now there are other people in the world who are 7'2" or 7'3" and there are other people who are thick. Maybe they're not as tall, but who are strong. So those are two things that Shaquille O'Neal possessed or owned that certainly helped him though, you might call those resources, but not everybody in the world who was endowed with those resources might have been able to succeed like Shaquille O'Neal did. What is it that Shaquille O'Neal did? What are the activities or the abilities he had? He used his resources to engaged in. What did he do differently or better than other people? Well, if you look it up on YouTube or some other site, you'll see that he was very, very good at pushing players out of the way with his strength and he was also very good at making points that were rather close to the basket. Because he was tall and strong and he was also very good at rebounding, getting the ball when it was missed. Again, he uses his resources. And so that's what was what was valuable to teams and allowed him to win. It was very difficult for other teams to defend him when he engaged in those activities of scoring. [COUGH] If I would have been in that possession, first of all, I didn't have those resources, I'm not that tall or that strong. And even if I were, I don't know that I could have done the same thing that he did. So, I hope that you're getting what I mean by abilities or activities. [COUGH] We demonstrate that in business, as I mentioned previously by looking at a value chain and we're not looking at resources here. And resources could be very important to companies, whether it's financial resources or human resources, but we're going to move beyond that and talk about the activities or actions or the abilities that companies have and develop. The value change shows the generic activities in which all companies must engage. These are the things that almost every company, if not all companies have to do to add value to their customers. So if you look at it, almost all companies even if they are a service company have to do something related to Inbound Logistics. They have to get some input and get it to a place where they can utilize it. They have to utilize it or manufacture it or rebundle it, if you will and that's one thing we might describe as operations. They didn't have to distribute or deliver the product or service and that's Outbound Logistics. They need to promote this product or service that they're making and so we call that marketing and sales and then they have to provide this ongoing service to customers as needed. And so we call these generic primary activities that add value for customers and you see that as companies engage in these activities, there's hopefully, a profit margin leftover and that's our definition of success, if you recall. There are also these supporting activities, which are very, very important, such as technology, development, innovation, human resources, hiring, people to work in your business, motivating them, all types of things related to that area. And so these activities are very important and so what's the point of that? What do we mean by that? Well, to put it simply, what the proponents of the core competency model argued is that it doesn't matter what industry you're in, you can be successful if you develop at least one core competency and maybe more in one or more of these areas in one or more of these activities. And so consultants over the past few decades have spent a lot of time trying to help businesses develop a core competency, a core ability in marketing or in sales. So in the next part, we'll go through this a little more formally and talk about some examples of companies and what their core competencies might be.
