External factors in the crisis of the company

The crisis of the company that is caused by the influence of external factors that make up its environment can be considered as a source of opportunities. But not all managers are capable of preparing the pertinent answers to the problems that may arise because the environments of the companies are specific to each case. The plot that organizes the external factors is peculiar for each company, it is dependent on the behavior of the variables of the economic sectors involved and of the rest of the organizations existing in society and of the variables of economic policy.

The fabric of institutions, organizations, companies, government, people and infrastructure has its own architecture for each city, province, region or continent that is spatially expressed as an eco-structure. It is characterized by its dynamism because it is in permanent change, but it can be predictable for a particular company.

This condition allows you to develop your strategy on concrete bases and to know the sources of competitiveness. Ecostructure is a human construct that can allow the definition of the borders of a company, therefore the environment can be rethought, modified and allow defining the possible scenarios for a company.

1. Introduction

The crisis of the company can be explained by the influence of external factors, they can be the determining cause of both its success or its failure without, of course, disregarding the influence of internal factors that must also be taken into account. This approach can help guide the formulation of more accurate diagnoses for the company in crisis. A global treatment of the problems of business management involves the study of the relationship between the company and its environment from a spatial point of view; the question that arises is how to characterize and describe the space within which the company exists.

A high control over the current and future performance of the environment can not only be ambitious but sometimes it may be impossible, unless the initiative that allows shaping its future starts from the company itself.

The reality of a company will not change if we always do the same; crises are necessary for people and for countries because progress is the result of facing changing conditions. But those who attribute their failures and hardships to the crisis are violating their own talent because they respect problems more than solutions. The real crisis is incompetence, the inconvenience that people and countries have is the laziness to find the solutions and the solutions to the problems of existence that are inevitable.

The crises that are most talked about, written and published refer to the economic crises that are actually the consequences expressed with numbers of the social and political crises that are brewing in the day to day of human failures, of the incapacity of those who exercise power and an intricate network of petty interests of all kinds. Human history is a history of crises, of changes that modify societies and men in a violent, unforeseen and non-return way. This generates evolutions and involutions whose victims are those who are not capable of facing new situations.

The generalized crisis has been considered in the past as something unique and extraordinary such as those that have occurred in 1929, 1980, 1985 and today from 2008 to the present day. However, not all crises are always taken into account, Charles Kindleberger points out that from 1618 to 1929 there were countless financial crises.

Society can be considered as a system that may be in balance or in imbalance, which means that it must have the capacity to maintain some of its characteristics considered essential, which can change only in the event that any disturbance factor intervenes. The system can be in equilibrium, which can be stationary, which is the static phase; balance can also be evolutionary which is the situation you are in the developmental phase of or it can be involutive when you are in the regression phase. This situation can be verified both in the environment and in companies.

But balance or imbalance are only perceptions that do not correspond to reality. In effect, every system is naturally in permanent mutation so its variables are not totally directly controllable by an individual company, so it can affect its competitiveness.

The environment seems to always be present in the crisis of companies, although it is not the direct and sole cause.

The classification of the different corporate crises, according to Iam Mitroff, includes twelve concrete triggers:

1. the reputation crisis, the impairment of employee relations, accidents, criminal acts, financial problems, sloppy mergers and acquisitions, the national political and economic situation, the international political and economic situation, the problems generated by State administration, changes in the market, problems with a product in the production processes and the laws, regulations and procedures that hinder the operation of the company.

The questions that can be asked are:

1. The mentioned crises where do they originate in reality? And how can the environment be described so that it allows you to exercise control over it?

For the first question we will have some answers later and for the second the possibility is to describe the environment from a spatial perspective.

The description of the environment from a spatial perspective can be done considering it an echostructure.

2. The business environment can be described as an echostructure.

2.1 The concept of eco-structure

The environment of the company from the spatial point of view is an eco-structure because it contains the various subsystems and their component variables, which are systematically organized in a way that allows their analysis and also knows the type of influence that they can exert on the organization. This concept can be conceptualized as the interlocking of the parts that make up the ecosystem in which the organization is located, are closely interrelated with each other and gives a particular characteristic to the environment, giving it a specific tone. The very existence of the company is linked to the spatial description of its environment.

The variables that make up the eco-structure can be grouped into more or less homogeneous sets or subsystems that are interrelated, which influence the operation of the organization and give it a specific characteristic. The sector-specific variables and the various external variables combine with each other, weaving a system of very complex and intricate relationships.

A company belongs to a community that works through the interaction of the various conditions in space and time in which it acts in relation to other organizations and individuals. The community we call eco-structure produces valuable goods and services for all its members: customers, suppliers, producers, competitors, government, investors, the education and science and technology system, and any other member of the community.

This builder is made up of a variety of organizations and individuals that influence a particular company, and in turn, it tries to influence the whole as a whole or some of its components. The need to improve the business concept, business model and business process of a company is unquestionable within an ecosystem in order to adjust to its characteristics so that a company can be successful and create value for society.

This is the particular habitat that a company has within which it can improve its competitiveness and can have a more attractive future.

The complexity of the environment can be measured in terms of risk, dependency, and interaction with other organizations through processes of cooperation, coevolution, and the formation of networks of contributors within a given space. This concept requires the ability to think within the space where the company operates within the framework of a much broader totality.

Ecostructure is the way in which the environment is organized as a more or less uniform totality within which a particular company that has a specific configuration acts and that is for it its place of observation. This way of organizing the environment can be described as a complex set of mutually interacting parts that makes its analysis possible at different levels and behaves like an organism that can transform and improve its forms, structures and states.

It is, after all, largely a conscious creation of man that has a definite purpose, therefore it can be altered by him; reason why its understanding is necessary and in this way a harmonious relationship between company and environment is possible.

2.2 The criteria for grouping external variables.

External variables can be grouped into subsystems following the following criteria:

1. the high relationship between the variables, the variables that fulfill specific functions, the variables that are complementary, the variables that are related to each other, the variables that give a specific characteristic and the variables that act as a framework that may or may not favor competitiveness of companies in a certain sector.

The environment concept with its relevant components and dimensions, however, has not been well specified in the literature.

Consequently, it would be up to the researcher to define the components and the way to name the environment, its dimensions and how they will be identified. This will allow observing the differences between the environments according to the relevant variables and their motor skills or dynamism, which will depend on the perception capacity of the actors.

The present environmental analysis is thought of as the totality of the physical and social factors that are taken directly. The subsystems of the environment make up constellations of power that can influence the behavior of the company; A key is knowing how each company develops or builds a niche in its eco-structure within which it can achieve its objectives.

Organizational environment variables can also be described in terms of climate and texture. Climate refers to external variables that are inanimate, unintentional, and uncontrollable constraints that characterize the environment over a period of time that are associated with texture.

The texture of an environment is how its intentional components are interrelated and how they can be controlled. HE Aldrich lists the following possibilities;

1. the ability to have resources: rich-poor; the degree of diversity: homogeneity - heterogeneity; stability-instability: fluctuations-predictability; concentration-dispersion of resources and consensus-dissent of dominance in territorial legitimacy and turbulence: the growing interconnectedness in the environment.

Emery and Trist argue that there are four interdependencies:

1. among the elements of an organization that produce changes within it, among those that come from the environment and that cause changes in an organization, among those that are generated in the organization and cause changes in the environment and among various components of the environment that allow that they relate to each other.

2.3 Organizations are grouped into species and related to the echostructure.

Organizations in general, and also companies, as in the case of living beings, could be grouped into different species, characterizing also different environments according to three criteria.

• The first criterion is based on the fact that some species compete with each other and can destroy or diminish the capacities of the others, it is the case in which you must choose between two products, or two companies or two different technologies. The second criterion assumes that there are species that are complementary or cooperative among them, it is the case when the products, companies or technologies that are complementary, this allows to optimize the capacities of all the actors. The third criterion arises when in some situations in companies parasitic relationships exist This means that they take advantage of other species of organizations that produce or possess resources;

This is possible when in society there are sectors that take advantage of what others produce such as: idle social classes, the State with high fiscal pressure, irrational tax breaks that generate privileges, comfortable social plans that do not promote the search and the creation of employment and the demagogic distribution of income practiced in some Latin American countries.

The indicated phenomena can be observed in the different eco-structures in which competition may predominate, in others complementarity and cooperation and in some parasitic relations.

The company will always be competing with other organizations for customers, markets, resources, tax advantages, suppliers, qualified personnel, access to technology, etc.

It is possible to optimize company performance through complementary relationships with other organizations, even if they are not companies: industrial parks, clusters, outsorcings, educational institutions, non-governmental organizations, governments, competitors, and others. Parasitic relationships can occur in relationships with the government, unions, unfair competitors, political organizations and various types of other organizations. These kinds of relationships are complex, but balance can be achieved in the end.

Literature has coined the idea of ​​ecological succession that refers to the process by which the cumulative alterations of a system gradually revolutionize its character, this statement is attributed to Kenneth Boulding.

This conception can allow the environment to be more predictable and could even, in some aspects, even be designed to promote the competitiveness of companies to the extent that it is possible to act according to the nature of the environment. However, ecosystems are constantly changing and evolving.

Peter Drucker claimed that society restructures itself; it changes its vision of the world, its basic values, its political and social structure, its arts and its key institutions.

Sergio Zacarelli and collaborators affirm:

1. better knowledge of the company and its environment, especially the productive economic system is key; studying or considering companies in general is not the same as companies in a region or a particular location; it is necessary to know the effects of the introduction of a new type of company in a region altering the market, the habits of the population, adherence to existing brands, competitors, the competitive system, suppliers, infrastructure and the behavior of the economic sector to which it belongs; it is necessary to take into account the consequences of changes in the legal bases that govern companies in the labor and tax field and subsidies;It is also necessary to know the consequences of alterations in the physical infrastructure where companies such as highways, highways, large-scale public works, telephone, communication and information processing systems, etc. are located. and the need to previously analyze the viability of a new company or a new industry with new technologies in a given ecosystem.

The greater or lesser possibility of predicting the behavior of the environment will depend on how its components and characteristics are analyzed. Mathematical models and the concepts of implicit and explicit risk are not sufficient tools to understand the evolution of companies and their environments. The unpredictable can occur at any time; Today we are living it daily, we can even apply the concept of "sudden death" in companies and in developed economies.

2.4 The dominant sectors.

The dominant sectors in a country can give their ecosystem their own characteristics, in the case of our country almost all the provinces have a dominant sector that allows their connection with the rest of the country or with the world. It can be highlighted that we found situations that despite the general recession that began in mid-1995 and continued in 1996, in some places growth havens appeared in the language used by the journalist Silvia Stang to mean that in certain Argentine geographies there was growth regardless of the general depression in the country, that the development of certain cities was associated with the existence of certain established companies.

The following are installed in the city of Córdoba: Renault, the FIAT group, General Motor and the subsidiary industry and the technology cluster. In Arroyito (Córdoba), ARCOR and other industries related to food and confectionery are installed, and in other parts of the province are located the dairy industry, the refrigeration industry and the oil branch that exports.

In Campana (Bs.As) you will find Siderca and other similar companies nearby. Oil and fishing are exploited in Chubut, and Aluar SA and other subsidiary companies are located in Puerto Madryn (Chubut). In Colombres (Tucuman) Scania and the subsidiary industry are installed and in the rest of the province sugar cane and citrus are exploited, which are the most important exploitations.

In Bahía Blanca (Bs.As) the Petrochemical pole and the seaport are installed. SANCOR and the subsidiary industry are located in Sunchales (Sta Fe). In Concordia (Entre Rios) there is Masisa Argentina that manufactures wooden boards, which is linked to one of the most important productions in the province: wood, soybeans, blueberries and livestock. In Jujuy the dominant sectors are tobacco, wood, the industrialization of sugar cane and paper. Oil is exploited in Salta.

In Formosa the public works stand out, in Chaco el Algodón, in Misiones the afforestation, in Corrientes the afforestation; in Sta Fe soy, in Sgo del Estero also Soy.

In Capital Federal the most important activity is the banking sector; in the Province of Buenos Aires it is the cattle ranch, in La Pampa the cattle ranch, in San Luis the promoted industry and the tourism, in Sta Cruz the oil and the fishing, in Tierra del Fuego the Tourism and the oil; in Río Negro, oil, fruits, tourism and winemaking. In Neuquén, oil, in Mendoza, winemaking, in La Rioja, winemaking and mining, in San Juan, mining and wine, and in Catamarca, olive, copper and wine. The choice is not capricious because it influences the geographical factor and the infrastructure that companies need.

Many factors influence the development of a sector of geography: proximity to markets, proximity to ports, good road infrastructure, exit to MERCOSUR, proximity to raw materials, the ability to obtain energy for the activity and the existence of skilled labor.

2.5. The company always operates within a referential and spatial framework.

The company always exists in a referential and spatial framework where it is located that it has the function of containing it. This space is at the same time a source of opportunities and threats, therefore it has the need to generate actions to adapt to new situations.

The environment in terms of eco-structure is the result of a dynamic process that can be the result of the changes that are generated in the company to the extent that it is capable of exercising sufficient power to make it possible. The structure as a whole, its processes and interactions act as an organism that co-evolves within a physical and virtual space. The company will or will not contain the aspects that allow it to leverage, that is, the development of strengths, and it may also contain the aspects that generate fragility or the source of weaknesses.

The company is a complex of relations between it and the set of external subsystems that contain the variables that influence its behavior and that, at the same time, must be able to influence its external environment to obtain its competitive advantages within a space that is defined by its sector and by the society that contains it. To understand the parts we must first direct our attention to the whole, because this whole constitutes the field of study that is intelligible in itself. Social life is presented at different levels: the economic, the productive, the factor market, the socio-political and the educational-technological. This set makes possible the perception of the extension of the spatial.

2.6 Culture is the source of the formation of the different “all”.

Society is a set of communities that are related to each other, and at the same time, societies are also related to each other. Sociopolitical and economic aspects may currently be the elements that unify the contemporary world in a new globalization, but what cannot be globalized is the culture that is the social component that fragments the world, continents, countries, regions and regions. provinces. Culture is one of the sources of the characteristics of the subsystems that surround the company.

Culture is the source of the formation of the different “all”, which is the aspect of human life that does not allow for a complete unification of the territories and that triggers the formation of eco-structures. The egocentric notion of the world, the illusion that progress is only of a western and Anglo-Saxon conception, that the foundation of the idea of ​​political democracy also originates in the so-called first world countries and that the vision of technological progress as an absolute they are not and will not be transferable to the rest of the world. The reason that explains this fact is that it will always be limited by the culture of each place in the world.

The functioning of the institutions of a society will be characterized by a specific color that is generated by the particular relationships that arise from the characteristic of a culture based on the biological inheritance of its members, the human environment, the characteristics of social relationships, of its geographical habitat and of the capacity to change it, of the characteristics of the soil, of the climate, of the presence or absence of natural wealth and of the existing relationships.

The external forces to a company can come from broader causes than the apparent ones that operate on each one of the parts and that sometimes can be are not intelligible in its partial activity, unless you have an overview of its activity in all the society. Different parts are affected differently by an identical general cause and each of them reacts differently and contributes differently to the forces that this same cause sets in motion.

These ideas about Arnold Toynbee's society can be applied to this case: that to understand the parts we must first direct our attention to the whole, because this whole constitutes the field of study that is intelligible in itself. The spatial and temporal extension of the society will be different according to the plane in which we fix our attention, each society has its particular characteristics that differentiates it from the others. But also within a society there are different communities and different societies in the set of societies that exist in a country, a region or a continent.

2.7 The subsystems that surround the company.

The subsystems that surround the company are: the economic subsystem, the productive subsystem, the supplier subsystem, the socio-political subsystem and the educational-technological subsystem. These subsystems give a characteristic to the environment of the company and determine its behavior.

The economic subsystem includes the economic structure in which a company operates, which can act as a cause of bankruptcy outside the company itself and is not just a result of poor management performance. However, management must understand the changes that occur in the economic system and adjust the operation of the organization to meet those changes.

The productive subsystem is made up of all the companies that belong to the various sectors of the economy and that make up a given society. The company has an economic function that society delegates to it, therefore it must have the capacity to respond to an existing competitive structure and be in a position to create new responses to new problems. This part of the external subsystems makes it possible to specify more accurately the evolution of the possible scenarios that a company may encounter because the variables of the different subsystems are linked to each other.

The characteristics and quality of the eco-structure can give a specific character to the sector. In certain regions of Latin America and Africa, the sector of simple or primitive agricultural machinery and basic tools may be new or growing sectors, while in most countries they are mature or declining sectors. Currently the impact of the crisis in Argentina will not affect all sectors in the same way, the most affected may be partially the automotive industry, banks and advertising, the least affected are the construction and the luxury industry and with little impact on communications, food and beverages, Internet and gambling.

The concept of declining sectors is based on the classic concept of the company's life cycle. The sectors can also be considered as recessive and depressive. In these aspects there are descriptive and predictive approaches among these are the precursors of the studies by Altman (1968) focused on discriminatory statistical aspects until those of D´aveni 1989 and Cameron, Whetten and Kim1987 that establish various patterns of organizational dysfunction.

The pace of business creation, regional characteristics, the average size of companies, evolution and access to new production technologies are important data to consider when evaluating a sector.

The subsystem of the production factors market includes companies and other organizations that provide goods, materials, parts of products and services such as access to financial resources, the availability of qualified workers and the supply of professional services (lawyers, notaries, accountants, consultants, etc.)

One of the fundamental conditions is to ensure the functioning of the supply markets for raw materials and materials and to ensure that transportation costs are competitive. The qualities expected from suppliers are quality, adequate costs, compliance, risk sharing, adaptability, contributing to company results and understanding of the customer's business.

The operation of this subsystem depends on the physical infrastructure that includes the railway network, the road network, inland waterways, ports, telecommunications in general and energy. It also includes the set of characteristics related to soil, climate, energy sources and various physical variables. In the case of our country, there are very important difficulties for small and medium-sized industrial companies: 58% are isolated and disconnected from some of the infrastructure services because they are located outside the Argentine industrial agglomerate. The basic services required are: trains, routes, ports, air and sea transport, electricity, the gas network and telecommunications.

The success or failure of a company in the long term depends on the success or failure of the place where it is located because it will influence the cost structure of: inbound and outbound logistics, production, marketing and financing. Location determines the optimization of access to customer, labor and supply markets and the choice of distribution channels; it also influences the quality and quantity of suppliers required and the future development of the company.

Experts point out that there are various models and methods that can be applied in this subsystem:

1. the Beherens model analyzes location as a matter of profitability, transportation methods are used to search for production and / or sales locations that have an optimal cost structure, and Alfred Weber's model is to search for the optimal location of transportation costs. transportation of supplies and finished products.

The sociopolitical subsystem includes social variables, the government norms that regulate companies, the orientation of public policies regarding companies and products, and the influence of organizations that regulate sectors of the economy. Social variables are linked to cultural changes, the prevailing value system, changes in demographics (birth rate, average age, social class, etc.) and changes in social trends that are necessary to know what demand or the market will demand.

The characteristics of a society can be described by a series of factors such as the social stratification system, the dominant religiosity, the social valuation of the activity of the company and the entrepreneur, the quality of social capital, the quality of human capital, the ability to take risks, entrepreneurial ability and trends in changes in habits and tastes in society.

Public standards and policies are important for the quality of the institutional infrastructure that affects the operation of the economy in general. Changes in legal regulations, those related to the environment, etc. They greatly affect the situation of companies. The political variables are the decisions of the governments that affect the operation of the companies. The legal variables arise from the legal framework and that influence the performance of companies.

The educational-technological subsystem is nourished by the education, science and technology systems. Education at its three primary, secondary and higher levels together are the providers of personnel for companies. On the other hand, companies demand new technologies for the production system and for the development of new products and services that are provided by the science and technology system.

In our country there are very few incentives for efficient investment. Very few people know what the quality of the product is in higher education. The university issue is not on the agenda of our rulers because there is no trust in the universities. The science and technology subsystem influences the operation of companies since with the appearance of a new technology it can make an industry, a company and dozens of products obsolete in an extraordinarily short period of time; its quality is measured by the propensity for innovation (technical or administrative, radical or incremental).

2.8 The mechanisms that regulate the eco-structure.

The mechanisms that regulate the eco-structure are those components that can enable its proper functioning. They are the elements or parts that give it a specific characteristic, a particular dynamism and a set of complex relationships between the different subsystems. Self-regulation to solve all problems was ended according to current political discourse.

These components can contribute or hinder the total operation of the system allowing its self-regulation to obtain the operation as a whole and of each of the subsystems. Some of these mechanisms arise from the company itself, which are those that allow, for example, access to different markets, access to financing, the ability to act in a competitive framework and the use made of the propensity for economic rationality., or technical, or political or existential. This last aspect refers to the unfolding of the personality of the members of an organization regarding the influence of their emotions, subjectivity, experience and intuition.

There are also other mechanisms that arise from the environment, among which we can mention: economic policy (inflation with stagnation, the increase in food prices and the fiscal pressure in Argentina during 2008 was 27.1% of GDP)), and the social climate (conflict, expectations, social mobility and the type of entrepreneur.

The actors of a society have different behaviors and this works as a regulatory mechanism. The entrepreneur is a continuous innovator who not only discovers needs but lives by creating them. The functioning of markets (final products, intermediate products and labor) are sources of regulations. The form of state participation (public employment, specific activities and non-specific activities) and institutional transparency are regulatory mechanisms.

The sources of investment, the updating of the infrastructure, the prevailing ideology, the level of openness of the country, the connection between the different organizations, the mechanisms of access to technology, the dialogue between companies and the educational system, the quantum of society idleness, the sense of existence (spiritualistic or materialistic conceptions) and the balance between family, society and work are other sources of regulation.

The management of a company must make decisions that tend to modify the world that surrounds it, but chaos will present itself if that world appears to it as capable of adopting infinite behaviors, configurations, states and different dimensions, with the same possibilities of being adopted and, at the same time, with the impossibility of deciding on them.

2.9 The change in the external subsystems.

The external subsystems are in permanent change; a descriptive precision cannot be based on a static description of the variables that make up the social system and the economic sectors separately. It is characterized by the speed and constancy of the interrelated changes that must be expected with the inevitable changes in the scenarios. Changes must be accepted as natural rules of the game, the management of a company has to adjust to adapt better, or have the ability to predict or be able to anticipate; This does not mean a situation of dependency.

In general, external factors can be specific due to their characteristics linked to the dominant activity for each country, each region and each province. It is complex due to the number of actors involved, the relationships between these actors, they can sometimes be unique but at the same time multiple and flexible, and the relationships can be cooperative and interchangeable.

In the global vision of all the companies in a country, as expressed by Argentine businessmen recently: there are four pillars that have to do with systemic competitiveness: the insertion of Argentina in the world, institutional quality, human capital, the determinants of competitiveness and energy supply and access to financing.

In Argentina you can find four types of eco-structures:

1. the urban-industrial, which refers to those cities in which industrial activity and sophisticated services predominate, the urban-rural, which refers to those cities whose economic and business activity is sustained by agricultural activity with high added value and With traditional services, the rural-traditional is made up of the populations with the lowest number of inhabitants in which the agricultural activity with low added value predominates and the urban-state are the populations sustained by employment and public activity.

The axes on which an ecosystem can move are numerous, among them are those mentioned by Mark Foster CEO of Management Consulting at Accenture who has stated that a multipolar world is structured around five axes:

1. the battle for new consumers, the distribution and use of human talent, the storage and flow of capital, the supply and demand of natural resources and specialization in innovation.

These axes do not have the same characteristics in all regions and countries and are not equally distributed.

Nations that have, or have had, a privileged position in the world competitiveness ranking such as Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Venezuela have not solved problems such as poverty, corruption and social inequality. The benefits of open markets, privatization, fiscal discipline and deregulation have not recovered countries, on the contrary, the gap has widened. The facts demonstrate that the policies implemented in those countries have not been able to solve existing problems such as those expelled by the new model have not been able to be incorporated due to the lack of the required conditions.

The question is why the Argentine and Latin American leaders have not adopted the experiences of Europe based on the welfare state creating jobs in the private and public sectors, or those of the United States with job creation policies and support the private sector without direct intervention in the economy. Either experience seeks to avoid the tendency towards marginality, informality or job insecurity.

The writer Carlos Monsiváis describes some aspects of the Latin American environment marked by: “for the horror of drug trafficking, inequality, the loss of jobs and for the mega-crisis that does not yet know how and when it will end. And it is a new culture because it is no longer dominated by the anxiety of a prosperous life, but by the recognition of scarcity as a limit ”.

In the basket of the South American region the average expenditure, measured in dollars, of a family in food, cosmetics and cleaning is different: Mexico 86.1%, Chile 65.6%, Venezuela 65.1%, Colombia 60.5 %, Ecuador 59.5%, Bolivia 39.2%, Peru 36.4%, Brazil 36%, Argentina 33.6% and the region average 47%. This may be an indicator of the conformation of the ecosystem of the respective countries.

The eco-structure must allow a balance between the company's social responsibility and the search for competitiveness. The companies of a country are competitive if the society of which they are part is competitive and the economic sectors that exist are also competitive. It is very difficult at present to say that in countries where agriculture and traditional industrial-era industries predominate, they are competitive as societies. In a society of organizations, each has to fulfill its specific purposes: companies, non-profit organizations, the government, political parties, unions, schools, universities and business chambers.

Competitiveness is related to a group of factors such as: the ability to respond and act in new and unknown circumstances based on the managers' management capacity and the use of strategies based on the position of the company in its environment, taking into account account the type of existing competitors.

3. The influence of external factors on the operation of the company.

3.1 The influence of external factors.

The influence of external factors that affect the operation of the company has been studied by various disciplines such as the economy that studies the phenomena of companies in equilibrium, this approach is not relevant for the administrator because it does not start from the same premises and has different study objectives of this problem. Administration is a discipline that deals with the imbalance that occurs in the operation of the company.

Management theory needs to extend outside the company itself by expanding its borders to further solidify knowledge about its internal aspects and the causes of its possible imbalances. Management knowledge is not static because its limits can be continually redefined according to the evolution of problems that arise in companies.

The key ideas that have developed over time to reach current positions hold that companies or organizations should be treated as if they were living beings and all that this consideration implies in business management. The emergence and development of companies is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon. For this reason, its analysis requires that a holistic approach should be adopted, that is, that it includes the main social, cultural, institutional and economic factors that define the arena in which companies are born, grow and develop.

The external factors of the company appear to be "uncontrollable" because they come from causes apparently unrelated to it because they arise from the components of its environment. The company is an open system that has to face threats and opportunities as a condition for its survival since it exists in a society that has a specific characteristic. Although external variables can be conceptually generalized, they do not have the same meaning, behavior and specific weight in each particular case because societies are different and have their own characteristics.

The problems that companies have are the result of the behavior of managers and the functioning of their organizations that cannot respond to the changes that occur and to the particularities of each of the possible environments. Therefore, it is inferred that the root of the crisis problem is actually of internal origin although its trigger may be some change produced in external conditions.

Society globally behaves like an organism which implies that its state of health affects all its components, as the economic system is one of them, this system does not act alone and in isolation because society is a whole as a system. The conscious action of each of the cells of the social organism does not matter so much, but it does matter that they effectively fulfill their functions. Otherwise we are facing a pathology, therefore all the measures that a company takes against this fact have to be recessive.

3.2 The imbalances in the operation of the society.

Crises express the existence of various imbalances in society as a whole; The classic vision in strategy tends to privilege the behavior of the sectors and the financial, technological, competitive, legal and political criteria. Crisis management today adds emotional, ecological, ethical, health, moral, spiritual, aesthetic, psychological and existential criteria to this list. Crisis theory is based on the description of how certain attempts to disturb the equilibrium of systems are verified and how they can be corrected.

The imbalances that occur in society generate quite complex phenomena that can influence the behavior of companies, below we mention three opinions that should be taken into account to explain the business crises that exist in some countries.

Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857-1929) denounced the fictitious character of the social activities carried out by the modern leisure classes that deal with non-productive activities and the incomes earned are without effort or risk; it is an organic failure of our society the existence of income without work and without effort. Adam Smith attacked the institutions that supported the entire apparatus of government and characterized many professions as unproductive.

The Argentine economist Silvio Gesell (1862-1930) pointed out how an organic failure of our society is the existence of incomes without work, he maintains that in times of crisis the so-called real capital is anything but real. The current idle classes have a much broader spectrum than those mentioned above because they are associated with a consumerist society that allows crises to be more frequent than in other times.

The mismatch in society has other than the aforementioned, other origins among them is that the world of the industrial era has changed to a more demanding world today. Peter Drucker argues that there are low and high productivity jobs that can be found in third world countries, in emerging countries and even in developed countries.

The lowest productivity jobs are:

1. Those who make and move things, public sector jobs, government jobs tend to be the largest low-productivity employers, and these jobs are the causes of economic stagnation, inflation, and social tensions.

In any society, Francis Fukuyama argues, today social capital should be the basis, which is the ability of people to work in groups, to gather around shared values ​​and norms. It is the third form of capital after physical capital and human capital. Social capital is born from the ability to relate socially, to trust other people or to have common standards of honesty and reciprocity. The aspects that cause the imbalances in the society raise diverse alternatives, among them, two: how it should work and how it really works.

The imbalances caused by external factors can cause the sudden disappearance of companies at any stage of their evolution or life cycle, as happens with people. The difference that exists between companies and people is that they can recreate themselves by modifying the object of their activity, their capacities and the endowment of resources, being able to restart new life cycles.

Understanding how external factors can affect how a company is inserted into its environment assumes that it is necessary to understand this process. In situations where the external causes that can provoke the crisis in a company could be avoided if managers were attentive to the evolution of their market, competition, customer behavior and any of the external factors that may influence it.

3.4 The mismatch due to short-term financial performance.

The mismatch in society also occurs when companies prioritize financial performance in the short term to the detriment of returns and long-term survival, where only the owners of financial capital win in whatever form of company. The irresponsible financial market power was encouraged by the neoliberal state and economic growth in recent years has been slower than could be expected, argue Patrick Artus and Marie-Paule Virard.

The same authors affirm that current capitalism lacks projects because it has failed to improve productivity, income distribution and try to bring more than fifty percent of the world's population to the labor and consumer markets with its thousands of million that practically does not invest for sustained growth in global coverage.

Nor does it sufficiently prepare the future of society and expose it to constant imbalances in the political and the military, creating asymmetries between countries that are difficult to overcome.

The targeted deviations seriously jeopardize the maintenance of long-term growth and profitability of capital that is the true raison d'être of contemporary business, plunging the world economy into a dead end. The aforementioned authors present a typical case that is that of Carrefour de France that in 2005 the staff had a salary increase of 1.79%, the shareholders 27% and the managers 4.9% compared to the previous year. The earnings of the companies that make up the US stock index Standard & Poor´s 500 showed a jump of 20% in 2004, after a similar increase in 2003. The earnings of the companies Standard & Poor´s Europa 350 increased 78% in 2004 and the forecasts bet on a new increase of 30% in 2005.Globalization led the world economy to take the form of a virtual, immaterial, paper economy. The financial sphere came to represent more than 250 trillion euros, that is, six times the amount of world real wealth, says Ignacio Ramonet.

Economies have worked to favor only the idle classes existing in the different countries of the planet.

This situation can be analyzed from two different angles:

1. It can be considered on the one hand as an external factor of the company because the whole of a company has a similar behavior, in this case looking for the financial return for investors in the short term as a priority and but it can also be considered as an internal factor for the case of an individual company whose fundamental policy is the distribution of high dividends to its shareholders in the short term, sacrificing its own future.

4. The responses prepared by the company to overcome the crisis.

The crisis is the result of the type of response that the company draws up to face its environment. The problem may arise when in some way the responses may be inappropriate and inopportune in the face of the changes that occur for which the company was not prepared. Poorly resolved crises cause a jump into the void, moving from a reasonably manageable situation to an unmanageable one.

Instead, companies that take problems and restrictions as new opportunities to create new favorable situations are those that are able to maintain prosperity in the long term.

Jean Baptista Vico coined the expression: "corsi e recorsi", or in the "Argentine" language: life is a merry-go-round ". Historical evidence shows that in reality this has never happened because humanity always tends to take steps forward rather than backwards. The environments are not totally predictable because the exact same events are not repeated, which forces the detection and understanding of the new signals adequately..

Postmodern thought is nourished by the dissatisfaction of today's man for the failure of solutions to the real problems that have arisen in the so-called post-industrial era in which the global crisis has been generated. The diagnosis of existing problems is so superficial that it has been confused as another financial crisis, for which past crises, their causes and solutions are recalled. The mistake is to think in the same way as in the past when faced with new problems in today's world.

They cannot be compared because they are different situations, for example, the state of technology of the 18th century compared to the current technology based on information, communication and robotization are not comparable; Industrial capitalism has become a financial capitalism and the previous industrial society was transformed into a consumer society, hedonistic and distressed by what are two non-comparable situations. But the most serious problem, which is the mother of all crises, is the distribution of wealth that is becoming more and more difficult; There are people in America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe who have to live on less than a dollar a day.

Life cannot be a merry-go-round, if it were so it would be convenient to return to the European Middle Ages because the vassals at least had the roof and food secured, this position cannot be accepted today.

Reflection involves establishing several referential axes:

1. review the concepts on which human existence is based, how to make people feel free, understand that crises are signs of change rooted in the past but caused by new problems that cannot paralyze human action in society and ideologies do not help to solve crises because they are normally dogmas and prejudices that distort original ideas.

Companies have to interpret the societies in which they exist, the answers do not come from past experiences alone or from fashion theories or visionary leaders. The understanding of the environment is what allows the possibility of elaborating the appropriate answers.

The events that occurred as a consequence of the current international financial crisis with the debacle of the financial, credit and real estate markets have generated significant accumulated losses. The loss of 750,000 jobs in the US alone, the layoffs of 131,800 bank employees worldwide and a drop in the price of oil of 47.2% has degraded the free market economy. But despite everything, there are markets that are actually found in any society. The key for companies is how jobs and lost markets will recover today and in the future.

What happens is that there may be situations of equilibrium or imbalance between real currents and monetary currents. The problem may be that they have applied operating rules that are not adequate.

In every social system there are companies regardless of their ownership system and the type of competition. The essence of the function of the company is the search for opportunities that arise from the needs of the members of a society, what can happen is that the frequency and the amount are different depending on the case. Communist, statist and theocratic regimes allow spaces for the market and free market regimes allow the state to exist in economic relations.

The results of companies during crises caused by adverse external factors are that, while some perform well, others fail due to the greater or lesser capacity to achieve them..

5. Crises always generate costs but also opportunities for companies.

The legal consequences of the malfunction of a company may compel the suspension of payments with the request of the preventive bankruptcy and you may be asked for bankruptcy; This is the result of a deterioration process caused by incompetent business management.

The social consequences are specified by the impact on workers, suppliers, customers, creditors, the State and the community where the company is located. The crisis has been studied under the focus of transaction costs and reorganization process costs, which conclude that insolvency, liquidation and bankruptcy processes have a high cost on the company, but that they rise for medium and small Business. The various authors have tried to measure the losses in the reorganization in terms of diverse aspects such as customers, opportunity cost, and access to financial sources.

Opportunities can come from:

1. when some of the companies in a sector shrink, losing invaluable intangible assets, thus reducing power vis-à-vis other actors; when the majority of the players in a sector take a defensive attitude against the disturbing elements of the environment with the consequence of the loss of customers, the loss of key personnel and unregistered tacit knowledge; the loss of market value of some existing companies in a sector, the loss of brand value and the construction of new brands thanks to the decrease in media prices and the greater possibility of building new competitive advantages due to the gaps left by competitors who have been victims of turbulent times.

Eduardo Navarro mentions successful cases in times of recession, among them he mentions Bill Gates who in an interview stated that in the period 1990-1993 Microsoft had grown 50%; but assets according to a Mercer study fell between 15% and 35% in the recession of the 1990s-1990s. In the recession of the 90s, Intel took the opportunity to make investments in new technology and launched the "Intel Inside" brand. Dell refined its telephone management and production system, which has led it to a leadership position. According to a study by Price Waterhouse Coopers in Europe, CEOs have tried to preserve those activities that are important for the future of companies: 84% say they have not cut their R&D budget,72% affirm that they have not reduced their expansion expenses and 77% confirm that they have not closed factories or offices. 53% state that they have opted to adjust the size of their companies by reducing staff and subcontracting those less important functions of the company.

A first look at the statistics on the number of existing companies at the beginning and at the end of the period 1996-2006 seems to indicate that the Argentine business base is showing signs of recovery after a period of strong destruction of companies that followed the late crisis. 2001. At the beginning of 1996 there were a total of about 368 thousand companies registered in industry, commerce and services, the total number in the first quarter of 2006 being close to 406 thousand companies.

6. The evolution of external subsystems and the design of possible scenarios.

The possible scenarios can be anticipated to the extent that the evolution of the external subsystems of the company is known, which can function as a possible advance description of its environment and that allows for a more accurate basis of the behavior of its variables. The two dimensions for analysis are: the variables of the general environment that is the level of society as a whole that answers the question: what type of society is the company in or will be in the future, which are the general variables that characterize it. Regarding the level of performance of the economy, answer the question:How the economy currently works and what are the possible trends of the variables of the sector in which the company is located, which refers to how the sector in which the company is and what the company will be like and what will be the future. level of their performance. The behavior of current variables usually have an immediate effect and the behavior of variables that refer to the future will have a mediate effect. What you are looking for is a higher degree of prediction of the competitive framework.

The process of changing the environment will depend on the motor and weight of each variable, which will determine its degree of influence in the process and its location in the macro or micro environment. Environments can be recessive, depressive, or growing. The movements expressed by financial, economic and activity indicators can indicate the retraction or expansion of a company and also the variations in the size of the organizations. The company, due to the changes that take place in the scenarios, tends to adjust its dimension through processes of retraction or expansion. The tendency of the company should be, in the medium and long term, to expansion as a condition for its survival, so it is necessary to select the indicators that allow its visualization.

The difficulty that could exist is that the dominant strategy in the sector does not match the existing general situation or that a particular company selects a strategy that does not conform to the true rules of the existing game. The sector of an industry may be characterized by new developments and new trends, but from a spatial point of view sometimes this is not the case because gradually or rapidly, changes in the scenarios take place that are important enough to require an adequate and specific strategic response.. This does not imply admitting that the changes are not universal because the ecosystems and the spatially different scenarios may be different.

A planning scenario can be conceptualized as that part of the strategic plan related to the tools and technologies for managing the uncertainty of the future. A scenario is a description of a possible future, but there may be several without necessarily taking into account the current situation. James R.Bright argues that the objectives of the scenario method are as follows: 1) to stimulate company managers to think about new and extreme possibilities and 2) to lay the foundations for planning.

The starting point is to describe the possible scenarios that may occur in a country and how they affect each particular sector using secondary information with elementary indicators, but which can illustrate the characteristics of the environments in a given period. A scenario also relates the tools and technologies we have for managing the uncertainties of the future and understanding the past.

In most cases, the future is in the present and has important roots that are in the past, so it is not so easy to modify the conditions that prevail in the current eco-structure. What has been said indicates that elements that can be mutated can be detected and the possible development of events in a given field can be predicted. It is possible to intuit as certain that the future will be different from the current situation, the desirable situation and the real one that may arise; the future is multiple and not unique. External variables are difficult to manage from an individual company, they can sometimes be controlled, neutralized or suffer. Scenarios typically have both desirable and undesirable components.

The changes in the scenarios imply that the company has to redefine the strategy based on the variations produced in its environment induced by the relationships between its macro components and the sector. In short, external factors impact the strategy, therefore it is necessary to change it when necessary.

The crises that can arise originate as a result of the artificial relationship between the components of their environment, some that can be mentioned are: the oversize of the financial system (formal and informal), the concentration of land ownership and other productive goods in a few, the excess of political officials and lobbyists, the excess of public employment in relation to private employment, unnecessary subsidies to the private sector, spending and low-productivity public investment.

In the context of the aforementioned ideas, minority forms of behavior emerge that are no longer illegitimate, such as processes that are contrary to globalization. Globalization and the relationship between the various markets cannot be considered as a set with universally uniform characteristics. The influence of information technology, communications, commercial and financial flows, labor market mobility, international interconnections, new ways of competing and the emergence of a vast network of competitors can take configurations of different forms according to geography, being specific according to each particular culture. Arnold Toynbee supports the thesis that the unity of civilization is a misconception;what has happened is that it has been possible to apparently globalize politics and economics on a western basis; but culture has not been subjected to globalization because non-western civilizations still remain alive.

The strategy of a company will be effective to the extent that its formulation is based on a monitoring system of its ecosystem and a prospective vision is obtained that allows the company to have an understanding of the possible scenarios that it has to face in the future, after analyzing the events of the past. There is an imprecise border between the possibility of prediction based on mathematical models, or on the extrapolation of the past, or on the detection of the currents that are insinuated in the present, or on the excesses of the imagination.

In all cases, what is sought is to reduce uncertainty, which is a true human obsession where behaviors are more dynamic in order to establish effective strategies for possible scenarios.

Relevant external factors will shape the components of the scenarios that the company faced or will face during its existence that somehow propose ways to maintain and grow.

A mechanism to reduce uncertainty is long-term planning, in Argentina 71% of companies plan in a horizon equal to or less than twelve months. This value is above the international average, which is 21%; Mexico has a value of 73%, Chile 43%, Brazil 30% and the world average is 3%. In Latin America, business is planned in a shorter period than in the rest of the world due to the economic and political instability in the region. The most common term in the world is one to three years.

Conclusions

Ecostructure and competitiveness are related to each other because the operation of the environment promotes the creation of new companies and also the maintenance of existing ones that can create more value, increase productivity and per capita income in a sustained manner. Competitiveness has to do with the systemic conception of the company where the environment plays a fundamental role, which according to what was mentioned in a previous section can be a human construction. All the actors that are part of an eco-structure have an active role in building favorable conditions so that companies can be competitive.

The competitiveness of a company is closely related to its performance and what are the operating conditions of its environment. The studies and criteria used on competitiveness already mentioned refer to the comparison of a country with the rest of the world, it would be "average" competitiveness. The various regions, provinces and municipalities of our country in terms of competitiveness are not comparable. The gross domestic product, income distribution and value generation are concentrated in a few provinces and the Federal Capital. Consequently, competitiveness between jurisdictions or economic sectors are not comparable because their eco-structures are different.

The conditions of the functioning of external variables and the behavior of existing organizations somehow condition global competitiveness. This depends on a comprehensive vision of the business environment that includes the quality of macroeconomic policy, the availability of financial resources, the existence of infrastructure services, the possession of human capital and the capacity for innovation of companies, educational institutions and from research centers. An economy is more competitive when the ecosystem in which companies operate leads to sustained growth in productivity and income per capita in a context of integration of each geographic sector with the whole of a country and with the world economy.

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