Most important resources for competitive advantage in an organization

This week, our discussion thread is centered on the resource-based view of the firm as espoused by Jay Barney. In the section on Human Resources in your text, Barney’s focus on the correlation between superior financial performance and organizational culture is emphasized, In the section on Sustaining Competitive Advantage: Transferability, it is shown that Barney believed that some firms are more profitable than others because of the value of the firms’ resources. To sustain competitive advantage, a firm must acquire and control valuable, rare, inimitable resources and capabilities, and the organization must be able to exploit those resources and capabilities effectively. This is often captured in the acronym (VRIO). Using Barney’s characteristics (VRIO), select a Middle Eastern company with which you are familiar and identify which resources are most important for their competitive advantage. Based on your analysis of the company’s resources, make recommendations to the firm’s management as to which of the resources you have identified should be invested in (or divested) and/or which resources should be acquired. In your follow-on response, focus on the viability of the suggestions made by other students: To which degree do these suggestions make sense regarding the possibility of gaining sustainable competitive advantage (related to value, rareness, inimitability, and organization capability of the factors)?