Strategic Analysis For Competing Globally - Jim Chengary DePaul University

In today's "Real Time" business environment, the ability to maintain a competitive advantage is crucial to an organization's longevity. As we have seen in the current economic climate, trends, which used to take months or years to develop, are now clocked in days and weeks. While a firm's advantage can be stolen due to extreme pricing pressure from the competition, a new entrant into one's space or an award winning advertising campaign, it's focus or vision becomes the backbone for how it will weather these and many other storms. Layering into the mix a cross-functional, transcontinental organization, strategic vision and business plans become ideals, which must saturate the enterprise.

Competitive, social, cultural, technological and ethical issues will be addressed within a global environment throughout this class. By emphasizing alternative paths, the development of company and industry strategies, along with an understanding the inter-relationships across functional silos, students will experience first hand the challenges facing firms today. By employing Capstone^®; , a computer management simulation, students will be managing a $100M firm. By imputing critical business decisions into the interactive simulation, students will test alternative methods for managing a business in a highly competitive arena.

Topics included include

• Business definition
• Internal analysis and outcome (SWOT)
• Competitive Intelligence
• Business analysis and forecasting
• Development of organizational and functional strategies
• Growth strategies
• Multinational markets and their dynamics
• Team building

Course Objectives

• Develop comfort and competence in the planning and execution of business and industry strategies on an international playing field
• Understand the importance and reliance between an organization's cross-functional teams and their impacts relative to business decisions
• Develop the skill to step back and view the organization, as a whole, is a combination of interrelated functions
• Call upon theoretical knowledge and methods learned in prior course work to aid in developing solutions for business
• Understand how one's importance in the individual sense is critical to the success of an overall team
• Understand in today's global business environment the importance of ethics

Course Procedure

Since the vast majority of business decisions include the involvement of a wide, cross-functional team, the simulation we will embark upon will provide the opportunity to work with new, unfamiliar faces to best mimic the real world.

You will be divided into teams that will manage your own Company through the Capstone^®; software. Your teams will be required to make various decisions as the management of this organization that will take place through a period of time, which will be likened to one-year periods. As mentioned earlier, the objective of this exercise is to call upon all past experiences from prior classes, pulled together to make the appropriate decisions.

To gauge a firm's success, several criteria will be examined including - Stock Price, Return on Sales, Asset Turnover, Return on Assets, Return on Equity, Market Share and Profits. Each team will need to assign weights to four measurements as to which will be of most importance to them. The largest weight, which can be assigned to any specific measurement, will be 45%, the least is 0% and, of course, the total must equal 100%. While each individual's firm's performance will be reviewed and discussed in class, performance will not necessarily affect ones grade. The simulation will offer will offer the chance to experiment in a laboratory setting with the leanings gained from the decisions being of the greater importance.

With the technological tools that are available today, "anytime, anywhere", business is not futuristic, it is the real world. This class will allow us to coordinate efforts at a distance, using the Internet and Capstone^®; remotely. As part of this, you will be running your companies through telephone calls, e-mail and our web-site. That being said, there will be not required team meetings outside of class.

Our class time together will be divided in several ways. We will be discussing current topics as they relate to articles that will be posted covering specific industries, organizations or people. A portion of our time will be spent discussing the challenges we will be facing as individual businesses and there will be at least an hour of time where your teams will be able to meet and plot their course for success. During that time I will be available to help add guidance and answer questions which the teams may encounter. The simulation itself will take place on the Capstone^®; web-site. Every week you will download conditions for your current "year" (remember each weekly session will equate to a year), print out status reports, fine-tune strategies, incorporate tactics and load in decisions. Capstone^®; will be a dual-exercise in that the challenges will be for the team as a whole, but for the individuals within each team as well. The individual will have specific responsibilities for their functional areas, while each student will also need to coordinate their own decisions with those of their teammates.

The Capstone^®; web-site is located at www.capsim.com. You will need to register on the site so that the system will connect you to your team and to the class overall.

Included on this site will be various tools that will be available to help in your coordination. Each team will have a Team Conference - their own private bulletin board where you can exchange ideas and plan your attack. A Class Conference will be available to the overall class, which will be used to collect homework.

As part of these dual-roles, each individual will need to make or review decisions under their responsibility and to contribute to the team's strategy discussion in the Team Conference area.

From a team perspective, each team is required to prepare a meeting agenda before class and post it to the web-site. This will make best use of your time in class. Also they will need to upload their weekly decisions and present their management model of their organization to the rest of the class.

Method of Instruction

• Interactive
• Class discussion on the business planning process
• Discussion on Capstone^®; and the activities of our teams
• Discussion of assigned reading or topics of research

Grading

B requirements

• Participation in simulation as well as group presentation
• Completion of group assignments and posting on the Team Conference section
• Discussion on assigned topics for reading or research as well as a one page response posted to the web-site
• Peer evaluation

A requirements

• Formal individual presentation based on a students choice of topic as outlined later in this document

NOTE:

C's can be earned under the following circumstances:

The individual hurts the team by not contributing. We are all in this together.

All the individuals within the team need to complete their individual tasks.

Your individual grade CAN be lowered by a poor peer evaluation.

A horrific outcome in the simulation. Three specific requirements must be met; 1) you must show a positive cumulative profit, ending stock price must be above $5/share (even in this market) and market share must exceed 8%.

F's can be earned through excessive, non-excused attendance.

Discussion Questions

Individual
As we move forward and gain comfort with the Capstone^®; software, various discussion questions will be given. Everyone will be required to prepare a "one-pager" and e-mail them back to me by the Monday evening before we meet. Some of these may require some research through the Internet; some will be based on a forwarded article while others may be thought provoking "what ifs?"

Potential topics can be:

• Iraq . What really happened and why?
• If you were President, what would you do and why?

Group

As we move further and further week by week each team will need to identify specifics elements for our Capstone^®; businesses. From that questions may be raised about new competitors entering the market or changes in the global business environment. From that each group discussion will focus around what those changes may mean to the simulation.

• For example, Company AG, a European conglomerate is planning on entering our space and is on quite an acquisition binge with per share prices so low. If they were to acquire an existing firm, what would this mean to the industry?
• Embargoes against US firms are being enacted through a number of foreign countries given recent political positioning from Washington . As a part of that what was thought to be an area of growth, is no longer. What options would your firm look to keep commitments to "the Street?"

Formal Individual Projects

Each student will be given the opportunity to prepare a formal paper to advance their grade to an "A". These reports may be on any theme related to business strategy, but will need prior approval. The final document should be approximately 10 pages in length. Also, the student will be required to provide a 10-minute presentation, time permitting.

Final papers will be due one week before our final class, and presentations; time permitting will be on our last week.

Peer Evaluation

Working in new diverse team can be at times be awkward and at quite others fun. What is most important in team environments is to understand who is contributing and who is not. As part of this simulation, we will be measuring one another's performance on our team. Based on a five-point scale with 5 as outstanding, 4 as very good, 3 good, 2 fair and 1 poor, students will be reviewed in ten areas of behavior throughout the course:

1. Contribution of time to the overall project group
2. Individual effort in getting things done as assigned
3. Leadership i.e. provided some type of direction to the team
4. Attitude towards the project
5. Attendance at meeting
6. Willingness to listen
7. Willingness to cooperate
8. Capacity to solve team problems
9. Came to meetings prepared to contribute
10. Overall opinion of ones contribution to the efforts of the entire group

There will be two peer evaluations during the course. The first will follow the simulations first round. The second will follow the presentation at the end of the class. Only the second evaluation may effect one's grade. Peer evaluations will take place on the web-site and will be confidential between the student and the instructor.

PLAGIARISM

Students enrolled in this course, and any others where independent research and writing are part of the requirement, need to be aware of the strong sanctions against plagiarism as stated in the current Bulletin/Student Handbook. If proven, a charge of plagiarism could result in an automatic "F" and possible expulsion. If you have any questions or doubts of what plagiarism entails or how to properly acknowledge source materials and the work of others, please contact the instructor.

Materials

• Capstone^®; Student Guide
• Articles for discussion will be forwarded in class, posted on the web-site or e-mailed. With the ever changing business environment we have entered in the past few months, rather then list these now, which may prove obsolete, the will be provided in the near future, but with plenty of time for review.

Class	Topic	Sunday 6:00p	Deliverable
1	Distribute materials Form teams Registration	prior to week 2
2	Guest Speaker I Intro to Capstone®; Situation Analysis and Team Meeting	prior to week 3	Practice Round 1 Download and print practice round 1 reports
3	Posting of Discussion Article A Round 1 Team Meeting	prior to week 4	Round 1 decisions Download and print reports for round 1
4	Posting of Discussion Article B Round 2 Team Meeting	prior to week 5	Round 2 decisions Download and print reports for round 2
5	Posting of Discussion Article C Round 3 Team Meeting	prior to week 6	Round 3 decisions Download and print reports for round 3 Peer evaluation 1
6	Posting of Discussion Article D Round 4 Team Meeting	prior to week 7	Round 4 decisions Download and print reports for round 4
7	Posting of Discussion Article E Round 5 Team Meeting	prior to week 8	Round 5 decisions Download and print reports for round 5
8	Posting of Discussion Article F Round 6 Team Meeting	prior to week 9	Round 6 decisions Download and print reports for round 6 Peer evaluation 2
9	Posting of Discussion Article G Round 7 Team Meeting	prior to week 10	Round 7 decisions Download and print reports for round 7
10	Posting of Discussion Article H Team Presentation Individual Presentations (time permitting)

Articles and Topics for Discussion and "One-Pagers"

A)

Motorola-

What is going on here? Once thriving, global leader in the industry, a changing market climate has driven share prices down and initiate thousands of layoffs. First they are up, then they are down, then they are up huge and then they tank again.

B)

The State of Global e-Commerce-

Can you ever really sleep?

C)

General Motors-

With Daimler-Chrysler and Ford-Lincoln-Mercury-Land Rover-Jaguar-Aston Martin is the "General" missing something in its global strategy? As one of the largest employers in the world, with the economic downturn in the US with effect nailing Daimler-Chrysler, what should GM be doing?