External Issues In Waste Management

Waste Management, Inc. (WMI) provides waste management services throughout the United States and Canada. They service a wide breadth of customers, including municipal, commercial, and residential by providing collection, transfer, recycling, and disposal services.

To begin, it is important to complete an environmental scan, a process by which management in WMI systematically surveys and interprets relevant data to identify external opportunities and threats to their business operations. WMI indeed faces problems via the external environment, which is composed of economic, technological, legal or political and sociocultural issues that indirectly affect all organizations. Sociocultural trends, arguably WMI’s most pressing external issues, are

Contextual intelligence issues will readily arise if WMI’s employees, senior management, and board of directors do not utilize contextual intelligence, the ability to understand the limits of their knowledge and to adapt that knowledge to different environments than the one in which WMI was conceived. The company has built their assets and corporate strategy around the idea of burying waste, and senior officials have argued that these assets should not be removed from the core business, explaining that taking them away will lead to WMI’s corporate demise. While a decentralized corporate structure allows WMI to give local leaders more ability to adapt quickly to changes in the local market, it also stretches out the decision-making process, meaning that more people are involved and decisions are not concentrated with WMI’s strongest

A series of recent natural disasters have increased oil prices dramatically; in some areas, fuel costs rose by approximately $0.35 per gallon between August and September of 2017, with economists predicting their gradual increase in 2018. WMI has grappled with legal issues, as well. In 1987, the U.S. Government accused WMI of violating antitrust laws through collusion. In 1995, shareholders sued Wheelabrator Technologies’ (WTI) board of directors, citing a breach of fiduciary duty and challenging the merger between WTI into WMI. Other lawsuits have surfaced since then, including one citing accounting improprieties in 1999 and another against SAP AG involving an ERP software implementation failure. Competitors, such as Republic Services, Inc., Stericycle, Inc., and Waste Connections, Inc., present a continuous threat to WMI’s business operations. New companies emerging that have the technological capabilities to recycle more and create greener energy may edge out WMI, especially as more consumers and large corporations make the switch to environmentally friendly and sustainable practices. The Environmental Protection Agency exists as a threat to WMI in that they may make waste disposal more difficult for