Management Policy and Strategy

MT460 Unit 8 Assignment

In this Assignment, you will culminate two course outcomes related to policy development: 

MT460-6: Compose business policies to enable implementation of a strategic plan.

GEL-7.02: Apply ethical reasoning to ethical issues within the field of Management Policy and Strategy. 

There is an important symbiotic relationship between strategy and policy for managers and leaders to understand. Business policy helps guide strategy implementation from a control perspective, but it can also enable innovation. Policy must be carefully developed so to empower employees, but must also be stringent enough to set boundaries and enforce expectations. To understand the central significance of the relationship between policy and strategy to top managers and their organizations, you must gain an understanding of how environments, external and internal, affect the functioning of an organization. You must develop an ability to evaluate environment to detect opportunities and threats in it to which alert managers must respond. It means an understanding of the processes through which managers can best determine those missions and objectives their organizations should seek; it means the ability to formulate and evaluate the best policies and strategies to achieve these ends, and the methods to assure that policies and strategies are implemented. This is an important strategic leadership and management ability that you must demonstrate and continuously hone throughout your career.

In this Assignment, you will compose business policies using ethical theories and principles from a leadership and management perspective. Ethics plays an important role in strategic decision-making. Managers and leaders must be adept in understanding such concepts like Corporate Social Responsibility, sustainability, diversity, negotiation, sales tactics, etc. All strategic decisions involve trade-offs, and businesses might pursue one goal while subordinating another. However, managers and leaders must consider legal, ethical, and moral boundaries and regulations with company goals, objectives and directives.

Leaders and managers must continuously hone strategic decision-making knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviors as an important 21st Century professional competency.

To demonstrate your understanding of business policy with relation to business ethics concepts in this Assignment, design a narrated PowerPoint presentation to include the following information:

· Conduct research to identify an article highlighting a recent (no more than three years old) ethics scandal using the Purdue University Global Library or other approved resources.

· Tell the story. Provide a synopsis of the ethics scandal by providing specific details about the company, professionals, victims, the dilemma, government, etc.

· Explain what drove the unethical behaviors and/or business strategies that caused the scandal.

· Explain the costs associated with the business ethics failures from a corporate social responsibility and/or environmental sustainability perspective.

· Explain what managers and leaders of the company should have done to prevent the scandal.

· Explain what business policies and strategic decisions could have prevented the scandal from occurring.

· Could centralized or decentralized decision-making have prevented the scandal from occurring? Explain.

· Compose and explain business policies that establish standards of ethical behavior no different from the ethical standards and norms of the larger society and culture that could prevent a scandal like this from occurring ever again in the business.

· Ensure your business policies balance corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability with economic responsibilities to shareholders to prevent inequity.