Strategic Choices

You have just been hired to the ABC company as its new vice president of strategic planning. The corporation is a conglomerate with divisions in the auto industry, pharmaceutical industry, home movie rental industry, and mass merchandiser industry. The corporation has seen lackluster performance in recent years because its competitors seem to have a more effective strategy, and, at the same time, business and economic conditions have changed appreciably from what they were 5 years earlier.

Given the multibillion dollar size of the corporation and the fact that it is a conglomerate with a very diverse portfolio of companies in varying industries, the CEO whom you report to has already given you permission to hire a staff of recent MBAs to assist your efforts. You recently completed the interviewing and hired four people with minimal real business experience.

In coming months, you and your team will be creating a completely new—and, presumably, more effective—strategic plan. You plan to begin by holding a kick-off meeting with your team.

Part 1

Deliverable Length: 1,500 words with at least 3 references, all new content

To feel confident that all of the employees in your strategic planning team understand all that you have taught them, you require each to prepare a streamlined version of the key elements of a company’s strategic plan. You require each employee to prepare the following sections of a strategic plan for any one of the corporation’s four divisions. You intentionally gave them no information about any of the divisions and suggest that they pick a current leading competitor in that field, and are to assume they are in that company as they write the following parts of a strategic plan:

• Mission statement (simply copying an existing real company’s mission is unacceptable)
• Industry analysis
• SWOTT analysis
• 2 perceptual maps
  • Choose any 2 pairs of criteria that you think are important to plot.
  • Explain why you picked those 2 pairs of criteria.

The 4 corporate industries that each employee can pick from are the following:

• Auto industry
• Pharmaceutical industry
• Mass merchandiser industry
• Home movie rental industry