M & IS 44285 SECTION 031
POLICY/STRATEGY
KENT STATE UNIVERSITY
SUMMER III 2005
DR. JAY WEINROTH
Course Syllabus
OFFICE HOURS, ETC.
My office is on 4th floor of the Business Building in the new wing of the building, BSA A421, phone 330 672-1150. E-mail may be sent to me at jweinrot@bsa3.kent.edu. Our class meets in BSA 213 four days a week -- Monday thru Thursday, from 12:00 to 1:55 p.m. My office hours are probably going to be 11:00 a.m. to 11:50 a.m. and 2:10 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. on alternate days to accommodate students’ schedules.  The actual hours will be discussed on first day of class. The required text for the course is Hunger and Wheelen, Essentials of Strategic Management, Custom Edition prepared especially for our class.  This syllabus is available on the department web site, http://mismain.bsa.kent.edu.   Go to the link for Syllabi, then to Summer 2005 and find our course.

PURPOSE OF COURSE
M & IS 44285 is the required "capstone" course for all students graduating with a BBA from the College of Business Administration at Kent State University.  In theory this is a course in which students close to graduation integrate the knowledge of their four years in our program into an overview of how to manage an organization so that the organization maximizes its performance in a competitive marketplace.  In reality this is like any other course that you take outside your major.  It gives you an overview kind of familiarity with a field of management so that you will be comfortable in your first jobs with the terms and concepts involved, that is, when the discussion is about strategic decisions that need to be made or perhaps the company’s annual strategic planning process.

INFRASTRUCTURE INFORMATION
1. Registration. You must be officially registered and paid up for tuition on the registrar's records to receive a grade for any course on your transcript. Students who are not duly registered in any course by the registrar's deadline will be automatically deregistered and will not receive an official grade until the problem is corrected. For any questions, see the Undergraduate Programs Office in BSA 107.  2. Last day to withdraw from an individual course in Summer III 2005 without penalty is August 8
3. Disabilities. Any student with a disability as recognized by the university office of Student Disability Services is entitled to have special needs provided for. Please notify me immediately if this applies.
4. Grade grievance. If you believe that you have been graded unfairly in any course, there is an official university policy with specific procedures to be followed. The first step is always to talk with your instructor about the problem. Otherwise the various university officials will send you back to follow this first step. Note that the office of the University Ombudsman, Greg Jarvie, provides advice for you in these matters.
5. Cheating. Cheating includes copying another student's work as your own or allowing someone else to do this, and turning in material that you have copied from a source other than your own words without acknowledging this by quotation marks and a citation of the source. Penalties provided by university policy for this infraction can be a failing grade for the assignment, a failing grade for the course, and disciplinary action.
6. Missed class and/or assignments. You are expected to attend all sessions of this class. If you miss an assignment date, unless you have an appropriate excuse, including the unfortunate events of illness documented by a doctor's written statement, death in the immediate family, or other events of similarly serious nature as determined by the instructor, a point penalty will be assessed on your grade for that assignment.

TEAMS
Student teams will be formed on our first day of class.  I would very much like to distribute those class members whose majors are finance, accounting, or economics across all three teams.
BASIS OF GRADE
The following grading scale will be used:
90 and above = A
80 and above = B
70 and above = C
60 and above = D
below 60 = F

Assignments and the grade points associated with them are displayed in the following table.

ASSIGNMENT	POINTS	
Team grade for 1st installment of written case study	10	
Team grade for critique work on 1st installment	10	
Team grade for 2nd installment of written case study	15	
Team grade for critique work on 2nd installment	15	
Take home final exam	50	

Note that there are no in-class examinations for this course, and no requirement of oral presentation of cases.

INDIVIDUAL GRADES FOR TEAM ASSIGNMENTS

For each of the four team assignments, individual grades will be calculated as follows.
•	First, each team grade will be an average of the grade assigned by the instructor to the team’s work and the grade assigned by one other team.
•	The team grade will be in the form of a number of points assigned to the team.
•	Each team must then meet and decide how to distribute the team’s grade points among the team’s members, based on whatever standards the team chooses to adopt.
•	Each team will then report its distribution of grade points back to the instructor so that these may be entered in each student’s record of earned points.

EXAMPLE OF THE GRADING PROCESS

	Example Team A on 1st assignment		
						
90.00%	instructor's grade				
						
86.50%	grade given by Team B			

Average of grade	1	2	3	4		
given by instructor &	 	Number of students	Number of points	Points =		
grade from Team B	 	in team	For this assignment	columns		
				1 * 2 *  3		
 	88.25%	5	10	44.125		
						
Team A's decision on how to distribute points			
						
 	 	equivalent grade on	 			
 	points	1st assignment	 			
John	8	80.00%	 			
Kate	10	100.00%	 			
Evie	7	70.00%	 			
Morris	10.125	101.25%	 			
Alan	9	90.00%	 			
Total	44.125	 	 			

As shown in the above example, each team’s work will be critiqued by another team.  We will have three teams, A, B, and C.   B will critique A, C will critique B, and A will critique C.

The second part of this process is that both the instructor and Team A will grade Team B on the quality of their critique, and so on for all three teams.

Detailed criteria or standards for teams and the instructor to use in assigning grades, both for the original assignment and for the quality of the critique, are presented below and in grading spreadsheets linked to the course schedule below.

Details on the team’s task for the case study.

•	We will form teams on the first day of class.
•	We will examine three cases from the textbook – The Maytag Corporation, Home Depot, Inc., and The Vermont Teddy Bear Company, Inc.  On our second day of class, by something like a coin toss the three teams will request their choices of case to work on.
•	The team’s work on its case takes the form of the strategic audit presented in chapter 11C in the text.  Your task is to perform a complete strategic audit of the company’s situation for the year the case presents (not for 2005!).
•	Use financial data for a five year period for the company (four years in the past and through the year of the case as the 5th year), from the Hoover’s site (find with search engine), from the Standard and Poor site through the university library data base, and from the company’s web site.  Find the company’s business home page by entering the exact corporate name (see the case in the book) in a search engine.  Select Financials.
•	Analyze the company’s Annual Report for the year of the case from their corporate home page.  Find this under Investor Relations, Annual Reports.  This is where you get information on what top management of the company thinks or says they are trying to accomplish strategically, the company’s culture, and other intangibles.
•	Do an extensive analysis of news items, business commentaries, and scholarly commentaries on the company for the time of the case.  Get this information through the university library data base (www.library.kent.edu).  Go to subject area databases, select Business and Economics, and use the first two databases there (Business News (?) and Business Source Premier).  Enter the company name and select the time period to search.  Read everything.  You will also find the Standard and Poor site under Business and Economics.

Presentations will be graded based on the following criteria:

General requirements:

1.	 Information from the correct time period, all necessary details provided, with no errors.
2.	All sources of information authoritative, identified clearly and correctly.
3.	Amount of detail sufficient to answer all necessary questions about the firm’s strategic situation.
4.	Continuity and consistency –– each of the items accomplished under specific requirements as listed below must be retained in the subsequent analysis so that you do not make one statement, for example, on page 2 of your strategic audit and then ignore or contradict it by what comes along on page 5.
5.	Effective use of writing – do not pad the presentation with text and figures that do not contribute to the analysis in a timely and hard-hitting fashion.  This includes the injunction to not waste our time by repeating statements from the case analysis given in the textbook.
6.	Clarity of the writing and the presentation in general.
7.	Effective use of graphics.
8.	Balanced amount of work across all the specific requirements listed below, rather than good work in detail at the start of the strategic audit and slacking off in the later details.
9.	Wherever necessary in the concluding portions of the strategic audit, choices you make for the firm are to be tied back to observations about its strategic position that have emerged in the analysis.

Specific requirements (note – chapter 11 C beginning on page 180 in the text gives an outline of a strategic audit.  Follow this guideline to the extent that it is helpful, as long as you are careful to complete all the specific requirement listed below):

1.	Examination of the histories and roles (current to the year of the case) of the personalities in top management of the company – focus on what in these histories relates to the strategic situation of the firm in the case.  Be sure to document who among top management was doing (or failing to do) whatever had an important impact on the firm’s welfare at the time of the case.
2.	Brief introductory description of the firm’s situation at the time of the case – return on investment, market share, profitability.
3.	Examination of the firm’s mission statement, vision statement if any, stated or implied objectives, strategies, observations on what internal focus there is on these at the time of the case, if any.
4.	General scan of the external environment as shown on page 34 of text.  Provide documentation of your observations from news and other appropriate sources for the time period in question.
5.	Preliminary statement of Strategic Issues Priority Matrix for the case, as on page 35.
6.	External environmental scan of Porter’s six factors of competition as these affect your case.  Include an analysis of how strength or weakness of each of the 6 factors contributes to threats and opportunities for the firm you are studying.
7.	Strategic group map of the firm and its competition as on page 42.
8.	External Factor Analysis Summary as on page 48.  NOTE – for team doing the Maytag case.  Do not copy the entries in the table on page 48.   These are for 2004, not the year of your case.
9.	Scan the internal resources of your firm.  Include all 8 dimensions – organizational structure, corporate culture, marketing issues, financial issues, R & D issues, operations issues, HR issues, IS/IT issues.  Get information from the university library data base, by entering firm name and one of the 8 dimensions as your second search term, and from Hoover’s, Standard & Poor, and firm annual report and other items on its web site.
10.	Complete the Internal Factor Analysis Summary as on page 67.
11.	Based on your above work, complete a corporate value chain analysis for the firm (page 55 ff.)
[INSTALLMENT # 1 OF YOUR STRATEGIC AUDIT STOPS HERE.  THE ANALYSIS IS COMPLETED]
[INSTALLMENT # 2 BEGINS HERE.  YOU PROCEED FROM ANALYSIS TO SEARCH FOR ALTERNATIVE STRATEGIC PLANS FOR ACTION AND EVALUATION OF THESE.]
12.	Strategic Factor Analysis Summary as on page 75.
13.	Revisiting the firm’s mission statement in light of all that has been examined so far and on the brink of formulating new possible strategic directions for actions.
14.	TOWS matrix as on page 79.  Generate strategies in all four quadrants but pick just two for pro forma evaluation.
15.	Identify the firm’s competitive strategy at the time of the case (page 77 ff.)
16.	Check news sources for identification of current state and immediate trend of the firm’s industry, as concerns maturity, consolidation, major changes – see page 82 ff.
17.	Select a corporate strategy (chapter 6) for each of the two strategic directions you have chosen for detailed analysis.  Follow the sequence of choices outlined in chapter 6 down to the very last level of choice for directional strategy.  For portfolio strategy, use only the Boston Consulting Group approach.  Omit the 3rd issue – parenting strategy.  
18.	Industry scenario as shown on page 47.
19.	Common-size financial statement for your firm, as shown on page 170.
20.	Comparison of two pro forma financial statements as shown on page 115, except do the projections for 5 years.  This comparison is of the two alternative strategic directions you have chosen to evaluate.
21.	Make your definitive case for one of your alternate strategies as better than the other, based on the pro forma analysis and any other evidence gathered in the completion of your strategic audit.
22.	Here we come full circle back to where the strategic audit began – identify who among top management must do what, how, when and where in order to implement your chosen strategic direction for the firm.  Do NOT include any considerations here of what actually happened after the year of the case. Had you been making actual recommendations at that time, you would not have had knowledge of the future, despite attempts to forecast it.  You may include new personalities among top management and even exclude some old ones if you wish to propose making executive personnel changes.

The issue  of timing.

This is the most important thing about our course structure.  We are on a five week schedule where there is no room for mistakes.  The central focus of our classroom procedure is the review of the team case presentations by the instructor and the critiquing team.  You must focus on getting your case study presentation material done early rather than even one hour late.  This only happens twice during the course – July 27 and August 15 – when your case presentation installments are due.  Note that the instructor meets with the critiquing teams the very next day for preliminary discussion of your work, and on the following class day the first critiques are presented!

Your installments are turned in as Word files, supplemented by Excel spreadsheets as needed.   What each team needs to do is to make sure that on the day the installments are due the instructor and the members of the critiquing team have a readable copy of the installment material.   The instructor will put a copy of the team installments on the web site, so he needs your material on disk, but you may wish to give the critiquing team a hard copy of each installment to facilitate their work.

Take home exam. 

This is 50 points of your grade and represents your individual work in the course.  You will chose one of the two questions available.  Your answer must be at least 5,000 words in length, ‘typed’ and hard copy.  Spelling, grammar, text edited for typos, and readable writing style will all be graded, as well as thoughtfulness of answers, extensive documented research, logical presentation of argument, reliability of sources, accuracy of your statements, and selection of what is important as evidence in support of your answer.   You may get preliminary comments from the instructor on your working draft.

This is an assignment you should begin work on during the first week of class and throughout the first four weeks to earn a good grade.  
Questions – choose one.

1.	On pages 115 through 118 the authors of the textbook discuss various pressures that impinge on the strategic decision making process.   But one person makes the eventual decision on the direction the corporation will be taking for the following year and beyond – the CEO.  Some boards seek to reward top management for taking risks that could lead to high returns; others do not.  To answer this question, begin with the strategic situation the company was in for the case your team analyzed.  Give a very brief introductory statement of that strategic situation.   Next report on some arguments you discover from exploring the web on the topic of risk-taking by corporations and by CEOs.  For this go to the first two databases under the subject heading Business and Economics -- Business and Industry and Business Source Premier.  Report on at least ten articles from these sources, summarizing the different arguments and their conclusions about the value of risk-taking.  Now, on this background, present an argument as to the different results that would have occurred for the company in your team’s case from, respectively, a high risk approach to the company’s SWOT/TOWS situation versus a low risk approach.  Use any evidence from your team’s strategic audit that supports your argument.  Complete your treatment of this question by drawing conclusions about the benefits and drawbacks of encouraging CEO’s to pursue strategic approaches that have larger elements of risk.
2.	Chapter five of your text discusses strategies of competition, including the phenomenon of hyper-competition.  In the chapter Wal-Mart is cited as an example of a company that competes through Cost Leadership, a strategy aimed at being the market leader (there can only be one) through making it impossible for competitors to achieve the same cost savings in operations.  This result is achieved in part through “cost minimization” in areas including service and sales force.  In this question, you are to complete what will be called here a social audit of the Wal-Mart Corporation.  Go to Wal-Mart’s web page, and summarize its various statements thereon concerning its corporate culture, including its annual report.  Next, go to Business and Industry and Business Source Premier again.   Survey at least ten articles there on Wal-Mart, summarizing the commentaries in an overall view about Wal-Mart’s impact on our economy and society.  Compare these commentaries with Wal-Mart’s presentation of itself from its web site.  Draw some conclusions concerning hyper-competition, with Wal-Mart as its poster child.

SCHEDULE OF CLASS MEETINGS, ASSIGNED READINGS, AND ASSIGNMENT DATES

Note 1.   The second hour of each class meeting, except for the first day, will consist of discussion of the designated course material led by the questions and comments you have prepared before class!
Note 2.  August 3rd through august 10th classes include the option of team  work sessions during the second hour of class.
Note 3 – for our discussion of the cases during the first week, come to class prepared to recite the facts of the case and comment on just one question – what is the most important strategic problem the company is facing at the time of the case.

Monday July 18
Introduction
Chapter 11	Tuesday July 19
Chapter 1 & 2
Basic Concepts
Corporate Governance;
Overview of Maytag Case	Wednesday July 20
Chapter 3
Environmental Scanning;
Overview of Home Depot Case	Thursday July 21
Chapter 4
Internal Scanning; Overview of Vermont Teddy Bear Case
Take-home question 3	
Monday July 25
Meet with teams for 1st case analysis (covers thru chapter 4)
	Tuesday July 26
Chapter 5
Strategy Formulation (SWOT)	Wednesday July 27
1st case analysis submitted
Chapter 6
Corporate Strategy Formulation	Thursday July 28
Preliminary reviews

Maytag	
Monday August 1
Team reviews 1st case analysis
Home Depot	Tuesday August 2
Team reviews 1st case analysis
VTB	Wednesday August 3
Chapter 6
Corporate Strategy Formulation
	Thursday August 4
Chapter 7
Functional Strategy
Grades	
Monday August 8
Chapter 8
Strategy Implementation – organizing	Tuesday August 9
Chapter 9
Strategy Implementation – Staffing	Wednesday August 10
Chapter 10
Evaluation & Control	Thursday August 11
Meet with teams for 2nd case analysis
Take home exam submitted	
Monday August 15
2nd case analysis submitted (no class)
Home Depot 2A
Home Depot 2B
Maytag 2
VTB 1
VTB 2	Tuesday August 16
Preliminary reviews	Wednesday August 17
Team reviews 2nd case analysis	Thursday August 18
Team reviews 2nd case analysis
Grades	

Criteria for grading the critiquing teams.

1.	Fair -- Clear and fair explanations of grades given on all items.
2.	Coherent -- Arguments identifying submitting team errors are reasonable.
3.	Constructive feedback  --Comments help submitting team to improve its performance and understanding of the project.  The content of the comments is appropriate and long enough for this purpose.
4.	Objective – statements of fact, meaningful references.
5.	 Timeliness – meet the schedule.
6.	 Clarity – are comments understandable?
7.	 Literacy – correct spelling, grammar.
8.	 Thoroughness – evidence that the whole strategic audit was read through carefully
9.	 Consistency – comments and corrections are consistent from one part of the strategic audit to the next
10.	Courteous –  identification of errors is done with politeness.

External Files
Link to Grade Sheet Critique
Link to Grade Sheet Installment 1
Link to Grade Sheet Installment 2