Case Scenario: Break up into groups of three to five each and discuss the following scenario. Appoint one group member as a spokesperson who will communicate the group's findings to the class. You are a group of senior managers working for a fast-growing computer software company. Your product allows users to play interactive roleplaying games over the Internet. In the past three years, your company has gone from a start-up enterprise with 10 employees and no revenues to a company with 250 employees and revenues of $60 million. It has been growing so rapidly that you have not had time to create a strategic plan, but now your board of directors is telling you that they want to see a plan, and they want it to drive decision making and resource allocation at the company. They want you to design a planning process that will have the following attributes:
1. It will be democratic, involving as many key employees as possible in the process.
2. It will help to build a sense of shared vision within the company about how to continue to grow rapidly.
3. It will lead to the generation of three to fi ve key strategies for the company.
4. It will drive the formulation of detailed action plans, and these plans will be subsequently linked to the company's annual operating budget.
Strategic Management Project: Module 1
Design a planning process to present to your board of directors. Think carefully about who should be included in this process. Be sure to outline the strengths and weaknesses of the approach you choose, and be prepared to justify why your approach might be superior to alternative approaches.
Article File 1
At the end of every chapter in this book is an article fi le task. The task requires you to search newspapers or magazines in the library for an example of a real company that satisfi es the task question or issue. Your fi rst article fi le task is to fi nd an example of a company that has recently changed its strategy. Identify whether this change was the outcome of a formal planning process or whether it was an emergent response to unforeseen events occurring in the company's environment.
Strategic Management Project: Module 1
To give you practical insight into the strategic management process, we provide a series of strategic modules; one is at the end of every chapter in this book. Each module asks you to collect and analyze information relating to the material discussed in that chapter. By completing these strategic modules, you will gain a clearer idea of the overall strategic management process. The fi rst step in this project is to pick a company to study. We recommend that you focus on the same company throughout the book. Remember also that we will be asking you for information about the corporate and international strategy of your company as well as its structure. We strongly recommend that you pick a company for which such information is likely to be available. There are two approaches that can be used to select a company to study, and your instructor will tell you which one to follow. The fi rst approach is to pick a well-known company that has a lot of information written about it.
For example, large publicly held companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and Southwest Airlines are routinely covered in the business and fi nancial press. By going to the library at your university, you should be able to track down a great deal of information on such companies. Many libraries now have comprehensive Web-based electronic data search facilities such as ABI/Inform, the Wall Street Journal Index, the F&S Index, and the Nexis-Lexis databases. These enable you to identify any article that has been written in the business press on the company of your choice within the past few years. A number of non-electronic data sources are also available and useful. For example, F&S Predicasts publishes an annual list of articles relating to major companies that appeared in the national and international business press. S&P Industry Surveys is also a great source for basic industry data, and Value Line Ratings and Reports contain good summaries of a fi rm's fi nancial position and future prospects.
Collect full financial information on the company that you pick. This information can be accessed from Web-based electronic databases such as the Edgar database, which archives all forms that publicly quoted companies must fi le with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); for example, 10-K fi lings can be accessed from the SEC's Edgar database. Most SEC forms for public companies can now be accessed from Internet-based fi nancial sites, such as Yahoo!'s fi nance site (www.fi nance.yahoo.com/). A second approach is to pick a smaller company in your city or town to study. Although small companies are not routinely covered in the national business press, they may be covered in the local press. More important, this approach can work well if the management of the company will agree to talk to you at length about the strategy and structure of the company. If you happen to know somebody in such a company or if you have worked there at some point, this approach can be very worthwhile. However, we do not recommend this approach unless you can get a substantial amount of guaranteed access to the company of your choice. If in doubt, ask your instructor before making a decision. The key issue is to make sure that you have access to enough interesting information to complete a detailed and comprehensive analysis. Your assignment for Module 1 is to choose a company to study and to obtain enough information about it to carry out the following instructions and answer the questions:
1. Give a short account of the history of the company and trace the evolution of its strategy. Try to determine whether the strategic evolution of your company is the product of intended strategies, emergent strategies, or some combination of the two.
2. Identify the mission and major goals of the company.
3. Do a preliminary analysis of the internal strengths and weaknesses of the company and the opportunities and threats that it faces in its environment. On the basis of this analysis, identify the strategies that you think the company should pursue. (You will need to perform a much more detailed analysis later in the book.)
4. Who is the CEO of the company? Evaluate the CEO's leadership capabilities.