management

Page 1 of 2

Exercise:

Telling the “Strategy Story” [email protected]

[ updated: Wednesday, March 25, 2015 ]

Course: MGT 360

Title: Management and Organizational Behavior (3 units)

“Inside an organization there are only cost centers. The only profit center is the customer

whose check has not bounced.”

---Peter Drucker (1909-)

“The best CEOs that I know are teachers, and at the core of what they teach is strategy.”

---Michael Porter (1947-)

Goal:

I want you to practice telling the “story of a strategy” for an organization in a brief

narrative using the theories, models, and frameworks from class. No single article on any

subject can ever be complete. You’ll need to make assumptions and speculate as

appropriate. In some cases, drawing analogies from your own experience may be helpful.

Objective:

Find an article on a current event that you believe is an example of an organization’s

strategy. The source of the article must be from one of the following sources: Los

Angeles Times (business section), New York Times (business section), Wall Street

Journal, The London Times (business section), The Economist, or Fortune magazine.

The article must be at least 500 words in length. For this exercise, “current event” is

defined as “since you have been enrolled in college.”

Print out the article in its entirety. On a separate sheet, answer the following questions.

Staple your answers and the article together, so that you can turn in this bundle.

Q1. Why did you select this article? What is its visceral appeal to you?

Q2. Identify the central organization in the article. To be clear: an organization is

larger than a single individual, but smaller than an entire society.

Q3. Briefly summarize a key strategic issue illuminated in your article. Also, is the

strategic issue chiefly at the business-level (“the core business model”), the

product-level (“key goods or services”) or a functional-level (“crucial internal

processes”)?

Q4. Strategy is always “all-inclusive”; that is, we use all tools at our disposal. Are

there any elements from our prior class study (e.g., decision-making, culture,

Page 2 of 2

diversity, HR, ethics/CSR, the role of managers) that you think are relevant as to

how this strategic issue arose?

Q5. How do you know this issue is truly strategic? That is, how do you know that the

issue is long-term in nature, is organization-wide in scope, and requires

substantive change on the part of many individuals?

Q6. Do you think the organization is (or should be) primarily using an external

approach to strategy or an internal approach to strategy? Which specific elements

of external and internal strategy (textbook, HBR, supplemental readings, lectures)

do you think best explains or predicts an organizational outcome associated with

this strategic issue?

Q7. Do you believe that somewhere in the question or the answer to the strategic issue

that either the strategic vision or the strategic mission of the organization is likely

to change?

Q8. Using the language of the Balanced Scorecard, what might be one or two

measures that the organization can use to know that any intervention to address

the key strategic issue was, indeed, successful?

Length:

This essay is to be no less than one and one-half pages in length and no more than two

full pages in length. Other relevant formatting requirements (“style guide”) are linked

from the course web page. Recall also that for all written assignments in this course,

10% is deducted from the content score for each type of error in language use.

Performance Measurement:

The maximum number of points for content on this exercise is 8.