CONCLUSIONS
The following conclusions may be drawn from
the foregoing:
The perceptions of chief executives
All CEOs rated company reputation, product
reputation, and employee know-how as the most
important contributors to overall success, and
there is no significant difference in the rankings
awarded by the different sectors, or performance
groups.
Company reputation, product reputation and
employee know-how were also identified as the
resources which would take the longest to replace
if they had to be replaced from scratch; suggesting
that they have considerable significance with
respect to the sustainability of advantage.
The most important area of employee knowhow
was viewed as being Operations, except by
CEOs in retailing and manufacturing consumer
products who viewed sales and marketing as the
most important area. This suggests that operations
should be afforded greater importance in many
business schools.
The emphasis placed on employee know-how
by the respondents to the survey is in tune with
the writing of Prahalad and Hamel (1990) on
core competencies. They suggest that strategic
thinking has been over concerned with taking a
market perspective, and too little concerned with
taking a core competence perspective.
Reputation, which is usually the product of
years of demonstrated superior competence, is a
fragile resource; it takes time to create, it cannot
be bought, and it can be damaged easily. The
emphasis placed on this resource by CEOs
suggests that a key task of management is to
make sure that every employee is disposed to be
both a promoter and a custodian of the reputation
of the organization which employs him