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How do firms differ in their use of scarce resources?
Published on February 28, 2023 11 min
A selection of talks on Strategy
Hello, I'm Jeremy Short, the G. Brint Ryan Chair in Entrepreneurship and Professor of Management at the University of North Texas and I'm here to talk about how do firms differ in their use of scarce resources?
One of the concepts I always like to think about in this subject of managing resources is the idea of famous fine artists. For example, you might have seen the famous picture of Andy Warhol's Campbell's tomato soup. Recently one of those paintings, one of those prints sold for $12 million. Some of his other work recently has sold for over $70 million. But the basic resources, are paint, the creativity of the artist, the subject, and the art world is one that's very chaotic, very high risk. We also think of many starving artists. In the same way that I'm fascinated by this, I really find it interesting to think about the resources organizations use to put together their firms, to put together their corporations, and try to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Much like an artist tries to differentiate their work from that of others.
There are two basic types of resources intangible resources and tangible resources. Tangible resources include items that can be touched and quantified. Cash, assets, the physical buildings, the brick and mortar, as folks will call it, an expression about things that exist that are part of the corporation. Intangible resources are much more ethereal. Things like the corporation's culture. It's important that organizations manage both tangible and intangible resources.