Office Depot
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Office Depot
Mission and Vision
Part 1:
Office Depot Mission
There is no clear mission statement as they have intertwined their mission statement with its corporate values. This gives the Office Depot employees a larger picture of their vision and specific guidelines regarding how Office Depot business is conducted. According to the website of Office Depot, the Office Depot mission statement includes its corporate values of respect for the individual, excellence in communication and fanatical customer service (Making Fortune, n.d.).
Office Depot Vision Statement
“Delivering Winning Solutions That Inspire Worklife” (Making Fortune, n.d.).
Challenges for Revitalization
In the last decade where the office supplies business has been affected by recession and competition from the online retailers. During this period, the organization has seen their share price fall to $1 and continuous decrease in the size of their market share. Due to the continuously decreasing size of the retail market, Office Depot merged with Office Max in 2013 and finally in 2015, Office Depot has merged with the market leader Staples. The biggest challenge of this period of industry wide transformation has been Office Depot merging with its competitors to ensure survival.
In 2013, the merger between Office Depot and their rival OfficeMax formed a $17 billion market share with above 2,200 stores. This has helped in forming a bigger No. 2 to compete with then industry leader Staples. Within s short of time, the Office Depot shares dropped 12 percent and the reported fourth quarter loss and decreased sales. Office Depot believed that the sales would help in offsetting the expense leverage they expected from rise in cost savings. The merger failed within a year as the growing size of the market share has been affected by the competition from Staples, online competitors and above all local stationary outlets (Cheng, 2014). The biggest challenge for Office Depot has been their inability to increase sales for years. Since 2007, the sales have been spiraling downwards and they have not turned operating profit for more than a decade. Without the continuous decline in sales and despite the merger with Office Max, Office Depot has failed to deliver on their objectives. In 2015, Staples and Office Depot announced a strategic merger to compete better with local stationeries and commercial suppliers who own around half of the office supply market and online retailers who take 9 percent of the market. The deal is still left to be approved by the FTC, due to anti-trust issues. Above all, the biggest challenge for Office Depot seems like survival in the coming years as the organization needs to ensure they can compete with the present market leaders and above all the increasing strength of online retailers (Vigna, 2015).
Alignment
The new objectives of Office Depot in 2015 include merging with Staples Inc. This merger is planned to consolidate the brick-and-mortar market share of office supplies. The combination of these two stores will help them to 4,000 stores worldwide and $35 billion in annual sales. The organization is also aiming to ensure they can better compete with the increased competition in the office suppliers industry that has seen bi-box organizations such as Target and Wal-Mart enter the market and online retailers such as Amazon increasing their market share annually. Since, customers have now more choice to purchase their supplies, a merger between Office Depot and Staples is a suitable combination for overcoming intense competition. Finally, Office Depot’s future objectives has also been influenced by the common investor in the Starboard, who has stake in both Staples and Office Depot and wants to ensure the survival of both brands (Hoffman & Mattioli, 2015). The mission of Office Depot has been to respect for the individual, excellence in communication and fanatical customer service and vision of “Delivering Winning Solutions That Inspire Worklife” (Making Fortune, n.d.). The new objectives of the organization runs on the same vision of ensuring winning solutions are provided to the customers. The merger would also help to ensure they maintain their mission of delivering the fanatical customer service that Office Depot is known for among its loyal customers. The merger will allow the organization to remain in existence and deliver on its vision through common effort with Staples. With the merger, respect for the individual and communication will be maintained with a larger enterprise with more stores and better ability to server larger number of customers and attain higher market share. The organization will therefore keep working on the same mission and vision and ensure survival and better market share through the merger.
Table
Salient characteristics | Comporting Elements of the mission statement | Comments, Recommendations, or Criticism | Respect for the individual | This element of Office Depot is broad in scope and focusing on respecting the individual rather than just customers. This ensures the organization is keen on the market rather just their present customers. | Comments:Office Depot does have a clear mission statement, rather they have just added their mission statement to the corporate values. Without a clear and concise mission statement, it is tough to judge the intentions of the organization. It is understandable that they mention that the mission statement is intertwined with the corporate values but having a clear mission statement is necessary for an organization with multi-billion annual revenue and presence in several countries. | Excellence in communication | This element ensures the interests of stakeholders are reconciled by the organization. Open communication with all parties involved with the organization will ensure Office Depot’s operations and services provided are communicated to the interested parties. | Criticism:Finally, Office Depot needs to build a better mission statement. Their current corporate value themed statement is not inspiring. An organization of their size should have a mission statement that inspires the employees and asks them to connect with customers and develop relations. | Fanatical customer service | This element arouses positive emotions and feeling. As the organization is aiming to make their customers loyal and regular customers. This aspect of the mission statement shows the intentions of the organization is to connect with the customers and this intention creates positive feelings towards the organization. | Recommendations: It is better the organization add a mission statement like a clear vision statement. The mission statement should be longer than the current values it is based. It is better to have a clear mission statement that inspires people to read and associate with themselves. It is good that the corporate values are part of their current mission statement, but they should be another element rather than the main function. | Fanatical customer service | This element also reflects judgment of future growth the organization expects by delivering exceptional customer service. | |

Part 2:
Strategic Analysis
Office Depot Strategies
Growth Strategy. For years, Office Depot has been known for growth strategy as their business grew for years and they entered new markets. But the aftereffects of economic recession left the organization vulnerable as profits turned into losses and the organization started to lose their market share. With this turnaround the Office tweaked their strategy to merge with their competitor in Office Max. This strategy remained in line with growth strategy but not through new products, entering new markets, but merging with one of their biggest competitors in the market. Their recent announcement of merger with Staples is also another feature of their growth strategy as they are unable to grow within the current market and therefore they have decided to merge with the largest player in the industry to ensure they maintain their strategy of growth with passing time.
Corporate Sustainability. This is a customer-centric approach that helps in explaining the possibilities and limitations of Office Depot. The organization uses solar roofs on their stores, even though the ROI on using the solar roofs is insufficient. This is part of the organization’s corporate sustainability strategy as they also focus on selling greener products to the customers. The customer driven and pragmatic approach taken by Office Depot highlights the business strategy in place at the organization. The organization looks at the buying policies of important and leading-edge purchasers such as the United States Green Building Council and the EPA, rather than measuring themselves the environmental impact of their sales. The go green policy used by the organization helps them to attract more customers and showcase their contribution towards the environment protection (Gunther, 2011).
Corporate Level Strategy
The current corporate level strategy implemented by the organization is of mergers. As the competition in the market has increased, Office Depot has started merging with organization in the office supplies industry to ensure survival from the decreasing market share. The implementation of the mergers is crucial as the organization has overseen declining revenue, marker share and regular operating losses. Due to these results and poor financial performance, the organization has no other option but to go ahead with competitive mergers with continuous pressure from investors. The organization has always used growth strategy and in the light of current industry events, mergers are the best solution for an organization like Office Depot. It will prolong organization’s sustainability for coming decades and ensure the overall market share will increase with addition of new markets and customers from their new partner. In addition, the industry has been hit with competition from large corporations such as Wal-Mart and Target who both have started selling office supplies. This move has eroded the market share of Office Depot and other organizations in the office supplies industry. Mergers would help the survival of organization like Office Depot and provide them a better opportunity to compete with large stores all over the world. Increased market share of online retailers, especially Amazon is another matter of concern for Office Depot as these organizations control around 9 percent of the office supply industry forcing businesses such as Office Depot to find alternative means to maintain their growth. Merger with other office supply businesses is the only feasible strategy that can help Office Depot to compete and sustain in the office supply industry.
Business Level Strategy
Office Depot has always been a specialty retailer and intends to remain the same for its coming future. Their business has been office supplies retail and they have merged Office Max in past and plans to merge with Staples. Making them by far the largest organization in office supplies industry, but they still remain a specialty retailer. This business level strategy has limited the potential for the organization to grow into a big-box retailer such as Wal-Mart and Target, but Office Depot was always supposed to be an office supplies retailer. For around three decades Office Depot has existed and fought of competition from industry wide competitors, online retailers, big-box retailers and above all the brick-and-mortar stationeries that hold the highest market share.
Office Depot’s business level strategy is carefully planned as the organization has chosen a brand name that resonate the products they will be selling. The organization aims to fulfill customer demand in a specific market and limits itself to that specific business. By filling the needs of a niche market area, office Depot has been able to gain the no.2 position in the office supplies industry and plans a merger with the no.1 ranked organization to develop market monopoly. The merger will allow office Depot and Staples to reach out to larger number of people with specialized services and guarantee higher revenue rather than compete for the same consumer dollar. Overall, maintaining this image of niche market suppliers, Office Depot gains a competitive advantage over other retailers who also deal in several other products and services.
Functional Level Strategy
At present and as mentioned before, the organization has started to plan a merger with Staples, similar to the way the organization performed their merger with Office Max. For this purpose, the organization will again use their highly-appreciated legal team and ensure theyn overcome the FTC hurdles to merge. In 2014, Office Max merged with office Depot and the companies stated to combine their operations. This was a tough undertaking as the organization needed to combine business and consumers in 59 countries with e-commerce sites, retail stores and b-2-b sales organization. Most of the work was completed successfully by the legal team of the organization, and similar is expected from the team to deliver with the Staples merger. Therefore, the functional level strategy of the organization requires significant input from within the employee base from different departments (Shuchman, 2015).
The legal department of the Office Depot earned their position among the Corporate Counsel's 2015’s Best Legal Departments largely on the basis of their lawyers’ masterful way of managing the integration of Office Depot and Office Max. This merger helped in forming a $17 billion organization in the office supplies industry and a significant competitor for industry leader Staples. Office Depot’s legal department is fully engaged and integrated in the organization’s business; they consistently showcase a commendable and unusually strong record on diversity. This due to the fact that their legal team is highly involved in helping others within the organization and taking care of the pro bono cases handed over to them for people in need. Overall, the functional level strategy of the business involves all departments working in tandem and for each other to ensure the organization is able to deliver their best to the customers (Shuchman, 2015).

References
Cheng., A. (25 February 2014). Office Depot’s challenges don’t end despite merger with OfficeMax. Retrieved 31 October 2015 from, http://blogs.marketwatch.com/behindthestorefront/2014/02/25/office-depots-challenges-dont-end-despite-merger-with-officemax/
Hoffmna., L & Mattioli., D. (2 February 2015). Staples, Office Depot in Advanced Talks to Merge. Retrieved 31 October 2015 from, http://www.wsj.com/articles/staples-office-depot-in-advanced-talks-to-merge-1422937999
Gunther., M. (16 December 2011). Office Depot's Three-Pronged Strategy for Corporate Sustainability. Retrieved 31 October 2015 from, http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2011/12/16/office-depots-three-pronged-strategy-corporate-sustainability
Making Fortune. (n.d.). Office Depot. Retrieved 31 October 2015 from, http://www.makingafortune.biz/list-of-companies-o/office-depot.htm Shuchman., L. (18 May 2015). Office Depot: Yours, Mine and Ours. Retrieved 31 October 2015 from, http://www.corpcounsel.com/id=1202726699620/Office-Depot-Yours-Mine-and-Ours#ixzz3qEPQLg65
Vigna., P. (4 February 2015). For Staples and Office Depot, a Merger of Equal Problems. Retrieved 31 October 2015 from, http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/02/04/for-staples-and-office-depot-a-merger-of-equal-problems/
Zain Books. (n.d.). Characteristics of a Mission Statement. Retrieved 31 October 2015 from,
http://www.zainbooks.com/books/management/strategic-management_6_characteristics-of-a-mission-statement.html