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Transcript

Narrator: Real-World Connections. Episode 12: Flour From Across the Ocean

Narrator: At the Hamilton plant, a quote lands on Daniel's desk.

Narrator: It's for flour milled overseas, priced well under their local supplier.

Daniel: It's cheaper even after shipping. Tomás, this could help with the price squeeze from Marisol.

Tomás: Or we go further. A firm abroad is offering frozen dough. We'd just bake it off here.

Hana: Then what happens to our mixing crew? Those are real people in Hamilton.

Priya: That's the global question. Work that can be traded across borders tends to move to wherever it's done cheapest. Those jobs feel the pressure first.

Adaeze: So which parts of us can be traded?

Priya: Let's walk the value chain. Inbound flour, production, delivery, sales, service. Then the support activities, like purchasing and people.

Daniel: Flour's a commodity. Anybody can buy it. Buying it cheaper doesn't make us special.

Priya: Right. Competitive advantage means creating value that rivals can't easily copy. Cheaper inputs help our margins, but competitors can get the same quote.

Tomás: And the frozen dough?

Daniel: That's our recipes, our fermentation, our freshness. Ship that out and what's left that's ours?

Kofi: My regulars come for bread baked that morning. They'd notice.

Adaeze: So we buy globally where it's a commodity, and keep the activities that make us different close to home.

Hana: And if we save money, we also decide what we owe the people whose work shifts.

Narrator: Globalization just opened a cheaper door.

Narrator: Now the team has to choose which links in their chain are worth defending.

Narrator: Which of Hearth & Harbor's activities should go global, and which ones are their real source of competitive advantage?

Pause and apply

Sketch Hearth & Harbor's value chain, listing its primary and support activities. Mark each one either "could go global" or "source of advantage," and justify your two most important calls using the readings on globalization and competitive advantage.

License: CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication), except the Lucide icons (ISC License) and the background music (Motivating Mornings, Mixkit (Mixkit Stock Music Free License)), which aren't covered. https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Back to '5.1: Globalization'