Business Management Report: Nedbank Mission & Pick n Pay Analysis

This business management report analyzes key concepts and real-world applications. It begins by examining Mintzberg's five P's of strategy and identifying five crucial sources of competitive intelligence. The report then focuses on the development of a mission statement for Nedbank, highlighting its core values and strategic direction. The core of the report evaluates Pick n Pay as a sustainable organization, considering its approach to social, environmental, and economic principles, and its efforts to support small businesses and local suppliers. The analysis draws on various sources, including academic journals, articles, and company reports, to assess Pick n Pay's sustainability initiatives, leadership management, and overall business strategies. The report concludes by assessing whether Pick n Pay is a sustainable organization based on its commitment to stakeholders, corporate governance, and long-term value creation.

Running head: BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author’s Note:

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Table of Contents
Question 1..................................................................................................................................2
Q.1.1 Mintzberg’s five P’s of strategy...................................................................................2
Q.1.2 Five important source of Competitive Intelligence (CI)..............................................3
Question 2..................................................................................................................................4
Q.2. Mission Statement for Nedbank.....................................................................................4
Question 3..................................................................................................................................4
Q.3. Examining if Pick n Pay is a sustainable organisation...................................................4
References..................................................................................................................................8
Table of Figures
Figure 1: Mintzberg’s five P’s of strategy.................................................................................2

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Question 1
Q.1.1 Mintzberg’s five P’s of strategy
Figure 1: Mintzberg’s five P’s of strategy
(Source: BARRY and ELMES 2017)
Plan: A strategy is made to deal with situation. For which, a suitable plan needs to be
made to achieve the desired goal. According to Louw and Venter (2019), a strong plan helps
management to encourage employees and team members to work accordingly.
Pattern: In the next step, the planned strategy should be implemented in a particular
pattern. The management needs to work on the strategy pattern that can help in decision-
making. In this case, the previous pattern needs to b included in development of strategy.
Position: To develop the position of the organisation in the market, internal and
external circumstances should be interacted. The organisation needs to take decisions
carefully and decide the position, in which the organisation wants to be. Organisation can
include stakeholders to get the competitive advantage.
Perspective: Strategy is made not only to get a position but also about large
perspective. BARRY and ELMES (2017) stated that it is crucial to find out the target
audience and understand their perspective towards the company.
Plan
Pattern
Position
Perspective
Ploy

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Ploy: Organisation can implement a surprising strong plan in the existing
environment that nobody can expect to take advantage of the competition. For example, a
telecom company can launch sudden internet plans for their customers to retain in a good
position.
Q.1.2 Five important source of Competitive Intelligence (CI)
Competitor websites: Website of competitors provides incredible insights into their
operation technique (Priporas 2019). For example, the competitor websites provides not only
corporate information but also their leadership team, marketing strategies, products and
geographical presence. Press release reveals news like market expansion, product changes
and partnership strategy of a company.
Social media: In case of competitive and customer intelligence, social media platform
plays significant role. Conversation in social media like Facebook, twitter, Snapchat and
tinder can analysed, which helps to understand the perception of customer and strategies of
competitive brands.
Premium databases: CapitallQ and Factiva are the paid databases, which are the
useful sources of CI as freely available data is limited. Such type of databases helps to get in-
depth business information on pricing, innovation, products and investment.
Annual reports: Annual reports help to get information regarding history,
subsidiaries, stakeholders, employee numbers and business growth strategies. Annual report
provides comprehensive view of activities and financial health of competitors (Louw and
Venter 2019). This helps to know the internal and external key strengths and weaknesses of
competitors.
Primary research: Companies need to do primary research of competitors. This
primary research includes interview, mystery shopping and survey. Moreover, primary data
can be collected from distributors, customers and suppliers. By this way, companies can
understand the buying behaviour of customers and develop the service accordingly.

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Question 2
Q.2. Mission Statement for Nedbank
While making a strategic plan, a mission statement is necessary. This is a fundamental
step (Nedbank 2019). This can be made from the ‘vision plus strategic direction’ of an
organisation. However, the mission statement of Nedbank is: ‘to provide a customised
solution to profitable high value plus sustainable segments in Business banking, Retail
banking and Wholesale’.
Question 3
Q.3. Examining if Pick n Pay is a sustainable organisation
Pick n Pay Stores Limited is one of the renowned companies in Africa. It has
expanded their business in South Africa, Zambia, Swaziland, Namibia, Mozambique,
Botswana, Lesotho and Mauritius. The company operates in retail sector via the subsidiaries
and associates in African continent. It is a standard family store that has a focus on their
customers. The organisation tries to understand their customer and provide services and
products according to the needs of customers. They are focused to the offers on apparel,
general merchandise and groceries with the value added services for the customers. In 1967,
consumer champion Raymond Ackerman had purchased few stores initially and from then
visioned to expand the business in African continent. The focus of the paper is to examine the
sustainability of Pick n Pay and in what context it is sustainable. The paper is discussed with
the help of various literatures including journals, articles, books and websites.
Sustainable organisation refers to that organisation, who aims to have organised
people to achieve advance sustainability (Coutinho et al. 2018). In this way, the organisation
achieves the goal in holistic and authentic way with speed. On the other hand, Dymitrow and
Halfacree (2018) mentioned that an sustainable organisation attends not only urgent issues
but also important issues and provides long term benefits with the short term. Sustainability
has three basic principles including social, environment and economic; moreover, it can be
used informally as people, planet and profit. It is necessary to check Whether Pick n Pay is
maintaining these principles or not. However, Pick n Pay has few holistic approaches and it is
also focused on problems to grow the business. Few organisations like Veolia and Unilever
has incorporated sustainability to make growth in business. In same way, Pick and Pay is
trying to incorporate strategies. Sustainability is not just about CSR but also includes

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protecting environment. This can include risk management, reputation management, and
business diversification, securing energy efficiency, sustainability reporting and employee
protection (Vargas and Negro 2019).
The company helps their customers to lead healthy plus sustainable lives. They
provide this support by providing access to healthy, sustainable and safe products with
informed choices. For this purpose, they have taken few specific goals. They have accelerated
the small suppliers to increase the local procurement into a supply chain (Pick n Pay 2019).
Moreover, they have improved the range and quality of local products at viable prices. On the
other, the organisation provides a national platform to small producers so that they can reach
to regional and national markets. The vision of the organisation is empowering and building
small suppliers and entrepreneurs by providing mentorship plus business improvement
support. The strategies have been developed to boost up the productivity and increase profit.
The company owns 49% supermarket business share of Zimbabwean. In previous five years,
the aim of the company is to make strong supply chain of retail businesses in South African.
Rodríguez-Olalla and Avilés-Palacios (2017) suggested that an organisation, which is
interested to enhance value for long-term should invest in implementing sustainability as the
central node. Companies like Pick n Pay have done large investment to become sustainable
and reach to a larger market. Cash flow is one of key elements, which is available to pay
suppliers as well as employees and also can be invested in business. An sustainable
organisation needs to have working capital that includes leverage and liabilities as an assest
(Maletič et al. 2016). Long term employee engagement is another factor that helps an
organisation to prove its sustainability. Hence, the organisations need to provide essential
support and training to their employees so that they can work in a safe cultural environment.
In such case, management needs to be careful and check in where they can improve employee
engagement. However, Pick n Pay has effective leadership management that looks into
employee engagement and also provides support to them to improve the working status.
Being a sustainable organisation, Pick n Pay should not focus on Public Relation tool
but should have holistic and authentic expansion trajectory. This can strengthen the company
for long term success. Issues like climate change and biodiversity protection needs to be
avoided and the company needs to focus on rigorous approaches to implement real solution
for its stakeholders (Ford and Despeisse 2016). In such cases, being the succeeding largest
supermarket chain store, Pick n Pay has taken few approaches for their customers. In recent

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days, the company is operating across seven countries in Southern Africa. In 2011, the labour
increases to 36,673 staffs from 3,137 (Pick n Pay 2020). The targeted audience of the
company is people of lower income, who need basic food with essential products to carry on
the livelihood. They can be of black and coloured population. Pay n Pick has strategy of ‘in-
house’ products, which became successful strategy and it led to increase the cyclical sale. In
2007, the company had proclaimed brand transformation, which consists of brand redesign,
advertising campaigns and new uniforms. The company has slogan ‘Inspired by You’ (Pick n
Pay, 2019).
Wijethilake and Lama (2019) opined that partnership working is crucial to address the
global sustainability challenges. The company is committed to their stakeholders to work
closely. Their approaches have achieved the UN sustainable development objectives. The
heart of the company is their customers, which undergoes commitment to do well. The
sustainable strategy of Pick n Pay is linked inextricably to their business strategy. The
company supports small-scale, local, black plus women-empowered business. Pick n Pay
Group is committed to support the highest standards of transparency, well corporate
governance and ethics (Vargas and Negro 2019). They have taken the decision to pursuit
sustainability and profit with growth. The commitment of the group is being good corporate
governance in every aspect of management framework. The Board operates as the resource
for executives to direct, finalise and oversee the strategy plus policy implementation of the
Group. The group aims to achieve the balanced social, environmental and economic
performance.
According to Dymitrow and Halfacree (2018), the board is providing support to
ensure long-term sustainability of business. Pick n Pay became a sustainable organisation; the
key reason is that Board supports materiality approach. This is emphasised the integrated
reporting on the basis of issues plus elements. This can have the material impact on
performance over long, medium and short term. Different departments for example corporate
governance, audit and risk, remuneration, social and ethics committee, corporate finance and
nomination support the Board to carry out the oversight. This is done to manage the strategy
of the Group with Group values. The organisation provides support to many small businesses.
ESD (Enterprise and Supplier Development Programme) of Pick n Pay supports selected
small businesses to enter into the retail market. This is done by introducing those products to
the customers of Pick n Pay. The organisation provides financial, marketing and supplier
network support with the essential training support that can help to become successful.

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Being an entrepreneur, they play the role of innovators and help to develop economy
skills. Pick n pay has strong organisational structure that supports sustainability, which is
embed sustainability in corporate culture. Moreover, strong leadership helps to maintain
sustainability in the company (Pick n Pay, 2019). In such case, it can be said that Pick n pay
has strong leadership management that maintains sustainability. The organisation has the
capability to engage several stakeholders along value chain plus employee engagement.
According to Coutinho et al. (2018), sustainability involves few stages, in which the initial
stage is reframing identity of the company via leadership commitment plus external
engagement. The next stage is codifying new identity via the employee engagement with
execution mechanisms. These are ongoing processes. This is followed by engaging outside
stakeholders. Louw and Venter (2019) stated that external engagement provides strengths to
the mechanism of an organisation, which also helps to overcome the challenges of the
organisation. By this way, the company improves service and product quality to gain
customer loyalty. As Pick n Pay has a strong cultural foundation that is based on innovation
and trust, it became one of the strongest organisation in South Africa.
Based on the above discussion, it can be said that Pick n pay is a successful
organisation that has expanded their business in the African continent. It provides support to
many of small business and has a vision to help customers of small and middle class so that
they can get a good lifestyle. It has potentiality to develop the revenues and make further
growth in future. The strong leadership skill and strategies helped the organisation to become
a sustainable organisation. The company has focused on maintaining a strong relationship
with stakeholders for further profit and help other small business to enter into the retail
market. Moreover, they have launched few value added services for their customers, became
very popular and provided support to maintain the sustainability in the organisation. The
employee engagement and shareholder engagement are helpful in such cases. Hence, it can
be said Pick n Pay has various key strengths, which helped the organisation to become a
sustainable organisation.

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References
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Ford, S. and Despeisse, M., 2016. Additive manufacturing and sustainability: an exploratory
study of the advantages and challenges. Journal of Cleaner Production, 137, pp.1573-1587.
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Maletič, M., Maletič, D., Dahlgaard, J.J., Dahlgaard-Park, S.M. and Gomišček, B., 2016.
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