Martha Stewart Company

Martha Stewart Company
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Martha Stewart Company
One of the proposed strategic alternatives that Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. can employ to improve its growth opportunities is better portfolio management. The media company needs to improve how it selects, prioritizes, and controls its programs and projects and align these processes with company strategic objectives and revenue generation. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. decided to expand its operations to increase revenue generation and reduce overreliance on publishing. However, the company has made several poor decisions when managing its investment portfolio, including buying unprofitable investments without due research.
The media organization needs to improve the management of its investment portfolio by writing off investments that dilute the brand or are unprofitable. Portfolio management helps avoid ruinous outcomes that arise from poor research and economic downturns, over and above, reducing investment risks (Baptestone & Rabechini, 2018). However, the disadvantages of portfolio management include little downside protection during economic downturns and faulty forecasting resulting from incorrect or unreliable historical company data.
Another proposed strategic alternative Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. needs to apply is to reduce owner dependence: the media company relies on Martha Stewart's celebrity status to grow its brand. Despite increasing its service offerings, the company and brand were built around one person meant that the business was at risk if anything happened to its founder. This company founder dependency risk has affected the company’s continuity and ability to grow sustainably. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. needs to diversify its talent base and groom other influential people to sustain the brand after Martha's departure. The media organization needs to build a management team that is passionate about the industry and understands the company's dynamics.
The advantages of reducing key-person dependency include the influx of new ideas and perspectives that challenge poor organizational culture and processes. A new management team with new perspectives will increase innovation and greater efficiency (Aebis, 2019). The disadvantage of this proposed strategy is the likelihood that with the shift in focus from the founder to a new management team, some critical institutional knowledge, experience, reputation, and creativity may be lost.
Although the information I gathered with my CLC group helped us develop and submit reports, I believe that locating more secondary data sources would have been of value in formulating recommendations. This paucity in available company information has prevented an exhaustive analysis of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc.'s financial and non-financial performance. As a result, the number of value-enhancing strategic alternatives my group could suggest was limited by the amount of information we could gather about the media company. We lack detailed and extensive company data on Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc.'s operations, activities, revenues, and fiscal performance over...