THE LINCOLN ELECTRIC COMPANY

The company's explicit mission is to serve three specified groupsits customers, its employees, and its stockholders. The company designs, manufactures, and markets arc welding products, and integral horsepower industrial electric motors. Lincoln Electric explicitly limits its activities to this relatively narrow product line, with an objective of serving the major needs of the users of welding equipment, and a goal of providing these users with the highest quality products at reasonable prices. With respect to its employees, the company's goals are to provide stability of income, and an opportunity toshare in the profits earned by the company. Lincoln Electric's objective with respect to its stockholders is implicit. The objective is to provide a stable and fair return on investment. Strategy at Lincoln Electric is developed and implemented by company management, with the consent of the board of directors. While management is granted significant autonomy by the board of directors in the development and implementation of strategy, it should be noted that, with an approximately 50 percent equity stake in the company, Lincoln Electric's employees are well represented on the board, and are in a position to veto strategies unacceptable to them.

Environmental Analysis Lincoln Electric functions in a socioeconomic sector of American industry where m

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equity holdings, Donald Burr is the most significant of the strategists at the company. Environmental Analysis In the American airline industry, management and employees are, essentially, adversaries. At People Express, Donald Burr attempted to structure the socioeconomic environment so that all employees felt as if they were family members with status equal to any other person in the organization. Technology is significant in the air transportation industry. It is not a factor of differentiation between competing firms, however, because the character of the industry is such 1 2 that firms functioning at different technological levels (piston engines versus jets, as an example) simply cannot compete within the same segment of the market. People Express enjoyed spectacular growth in market share in the first few years of its existence. It accomplished this growth primarily through a competitorbased strategy, which introduced nofrills service and pricing to a wide geographic segment of the air passenger market in the United States. To its credit, People Express achieved this growth during a recessionary period when other airline companies were struggling. The major threat to the company, however, lay in the fact
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Approximate Word count = 3430
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)

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