Activity: External Factors

Morton Brothers Hardware is a small, family-owned hardware store that has been in business for 60 years. They are located in Carlisle, a small town of about 4,000 people. The nearest competing hardware store is also family-owned and is 15 miles from Morton Brothers. However, there is a new Tesco 6 miles away that sells hardware products as part of their larger inventory. As older customers are moving into retirement communities, an influx of younger families are moving into Carlisle. Many of these younger families come into Morton Brothers asking about tools they have seen on Amazon.co.uk, where the tools are offered at a lower price and include free shipping.

These younger families also inquire as to why Morton Brothers only advertises in the local paper and why they do not have a Web site, utilise social networking or utilise daily deal Web sites (such as Groupon). As a result, Morton Brothers has seen a decline in their profits over the past few years.

Though Morton Brothers has not made any significant changes to their business practises, their external environment has been changing. Changes to the external environment pose major challenges to organisations, since organisations have little control over external environmental factors and often find it difficult to predict their impact. In this Shared Activity, you will research an organisation and the potential impact of external environmental factors on that organisation, and share your findings in a blog posting.

To prepare for this Shared Activity:
- Review the resources from this unit and focus on external environmental factors.
- Consider how external environmental factors might impact the success of an organisation.
- Think about organisations or products that have been positively or negatively impacted by their external environment.
- Select one of those organisations or products and research it on the Internet.

To complete this Shared Activity:

- Create a blog post that provides your analysis of how the organisation or product you selected was positively or negatively impacted by external environmental factors, and what, if anything, the organisation did in response. Be sure to support your analysis with citations from the literature.

The company that I have chosen for this purpose is Apple. The company is an American multinational which is known to be selling consumer electronics, computer software other online services

Attachment:- MGMT.pdf