I hope you are enjoying the first week of Foundations of Business Strategy. While we are only in our first week, I encourage you to begin thinking about the final project. To be clear, the final project is an individual assignment and should represent your own work. However, I welcome you and encourage you to discuss your final project with others. This will help improve your project and increase your comfort with strategic analysis.
The final project is to perform a strategic analysis of an organization of your choosing (please see the Final Project tab for more details). I recommend that you identify the organization you wish to analyze as soon as possible. You may select any organization of your choosing provided that it is not the subject of one of the course cases (e.g., Google, Apple, Piaggio). While I will not be providing a list of potential organizations to analyze, there may be some individuals participating in the forums seeking analyses for their own organizations. If this is of interest to you, I encourage you to work with those individuals to collect information for your analysis.
The final project is due by 11:59pm GMT on April 14th. Once you have selected your organization for analysis, I recommend that you begin applying the various tools from the Strategist's Toolkit. For example, you could conduct a competitor analysis and environmental analysis for your chosen organization after this week. Each of these tools will make an excellent exhibit in your final report. The executive summary of your report should integrate the insights from the various tools into a compelling recommendation for a particular course of action to help improve the organization's current competitive position.
Good luck with your projects and, remember, don't wait to the last few days to begin!
Take care,
Mike
Foundations of Business Strategy Course Team
