M&IS 44285 Spring 2009 Weinroth

M & IS 44285: Integrated Business Policy/Strategy

Spring 2009: Section 007 (19774)

110 BSA Tuesday, Thursday, 5:30 to 6:45 p.m.

Instructor: Dr. Jay Weinroth

mailto:gweinroth@gmail.com

Office hours: TBA.

TEXTBOOK: The textbook for this course is the Custom Edition of Hunger and Wheelen, Essentials of Strategic Management, Pearson Custom Publishing, Prentice-Hall, Boston, MA. 2004.  The book is available at the university bookstore.  All assigned readings shown in the class schedule are from this book.

E-MAIL CONTACT SYSTEM – VERY IMPORTANT – our class will be organized into teams for pursuit of the strategic analysis assignment.  Each team will have a designated leader and a second in command, whose e-mail addresses you submit to me on the first night of class.  You will then organize an e-mail communication procedure within your team.  In the event of winter weather making our trip to the campus dangerous on a particular class night, I will notify the team leaders (2 for each team) by e-mail two hours before class time and you will continue the communication within the team.   If we have to cancel a class, we will revise the schedule accordingly.

Contact with the instructor.

Usually the best way to reach me is at the e-mail address shown above.  However during a class day you should leave messages for me by calling the office of Management and Information Systems, 330 672-1140, Department Senior Secretary Ms. Pam Silliman, or by taping a note on the door of Dr. Geoff Steinberg’s office, A Wing of the 4^th floor of the Business Building.  We will identify a good time and place for office hours in our in-class discussion.

University Logistics:  The Following Policies Apply to All Students in this Course

A.    Students attending the course who do not have the proper prerequisite risk being deregistered from the class.

B.     Students have responsibility to ensure they are properly enrolled in classes.  You are advised to review your official class schedule (using Student Tools/Flashfast) during the first two weeks of the semester to ensure you are properly enrolled in this class and section.  Should you find an error in your class schedule, you have until Friday, January 30, 2009 to correct the error with your advising office.  If registration errors are not corrected by this date and you continue to attend and participate in classes for which you are not officially enrolled, you are advised now that you will not receive a grade at the conclusion of the semester for any class in which you are not properly registered.

C.    Academic Honesty:  Cheating means to misrepresent the source, nature, or other conditions of your academic work (e.g., tests, papers, projects, assignments) so as to get undeserved credit.  The use of the intellectual property of others without giving them appropriate credit is a serious academic offense.  It is the University's policy that cheating or plagiarism result in receiving a failing grade for the work or course.  Repeat offenses result in dismissal from the University.

D.    For Spring 2009, the course withdrawal deadline is Sunday, April 5, 2009.   Withdrawal before the deadline results in a "W" on the official transcript; after the deadline a grade must be calculated and reported.

E.     Students with disabilities:  University policy 3342-3-18 requires that students with disabilities be provided reasonable accommodations to ensure their equal access equal access course content.  If you have documented disability and require accommodations, please contact the instructor at the beginning of the semester to make arrangements for necessary classroom adjustments.  Please note, you must first verify your eligibility for these through the Student Accessibility Services (contact 330-672-3391 or visit www.kent.edu/sas for more information on registration procedures).

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

Attendance                                                     10 points

3 team presentations – strategic audit –

      20 minutes each     total =                         30 points

2 major team presentations –

 Strategic audit  40 minutes each

              Total =                                               40 points

2 minor critiques of another team

               Total =                                                5 points

2 major critiques of another team

               Total =                                              15 points                    
                                               

Grading scale:  A 89, B 79, C 67, D 55 F 0

Plusses and minuses will not be used.

Attendance.  Think of this as a free 10 points of your grade.  A half point will be awarded for each class session you attend, up to a total of 20 sessions.  There are specifics about this component of your grade.  You must be in your assigned seat no later than 5:45 (although the instructor will start class promptly at 5:30 – this allows for traffic mishaps and the like), you must be present in class for all the activity of that evening (including returning on time from breaks), you must remain until the end of class (unless you  have a valid reason to leave and notify the instructor before class), and you must remain awake.  This is an all or nothing point award – you won’t get a quarter point for showing up for half of class, etc.  As there are 30 class meetings in which you can earn a half point with a maximum of ten points, we probably need not deal with questions of legitimate absences.  However, for many reasons you need to notify the instructor whenever you know you will be absent, and thoroughly check this out with your team mates.  While you are in class, asking questions and offering comments for discussion is highly encouraged, in order to avoid the boredom of listening to an instructor monologue.  There are no dumb questions.  If the instructor does not know the answer to your question, perhaps someone else in class does, or you can be directed to a source where you can find the answer.  You won’t learn if you don’t ask.

THE STRATEGIC AUDIT – STAGES AND PRO FORMA COMPARISON.

The focus of the course is the strategic audit.  Your team will analyze one of the companies from the following list of case studies in the textbook:

Harley Davidson

Panera Breads

Home Depot

American Airlines

The material in the case study, supplemented by information from the Internet as needed, constitutes the basis of the first three stages of the strategic audit of your company.  See the hand-out sheet for a diagram of the process.   The first three stages are the External Factors Analysis Summary, the Internal Factors Analysis Summary, and the Strategic Factors Analysis Summary.  The last analysis leads into a matrix of possible corporate level strategies for your company that trace their origins back to maximizing positives and minimizing negatives for the company.   Your presentations of the three Analysis Summaries will have a simple and clear structure – present the items in your analysis table following the examples in the textbook and using the facts in the case study, supplemented where appropriate from the Internet, and identify the data source (in the case study or on the Internet) for each item in the table.   The presentation of the Strategic Factors Analysis Summary is a major presentation, ending in a reasoned argument for choosing just two competing strategies out of all the possibilities in what the authors call the TOWS matrix (SWOT backwards).

In the last stage of your strategic audit, you complete a common size analysis to provide a perspective on the ratios between revenues and costs in your company, and a pro forma spreadsheet (format to be provided by the instructor) for your two strategic alternatives.  Your fourth presentation will culminate in an argument, both in terms of the numbers and your strategic vision for your company, in favor of just one strategic policy.  We will follow up the four step strategic audit with a study for each company of considerations of implementation and control of the recommended strategy.  In making the transition from the case study to the current time period you will make use of performance data and important historical events (e.g. acquisitions and divestments) reported in the company’s series of annual reports and other news items from the Web.  Typically on-line company annual reports are found on the corporate web site under Investor Relations.  You may need to download the latest version of Adobe Reader to access this material (go to adobe.com and follow instructions).

A WRITTEN COPY OF YOUR TEAM’S PRESENTATION IS ALWAYS DUE IN CLASS (HARD COPY) ON THE DATE OF YOUR PRESENTATION.

REQUIRED FORMAT FOR WRITTEN REPORTS:

The following requirements apply to all written assignments for this course.

1. Word-processed using Times New Roman font size = 12.
2.  A cover page, displaying the course number, the date, the team number, the name of the assignment, the names of the team members, and an e-mail contact for the team’s leader. 
3. Except for the cover page, double-spaced.
4. Page numbers, beginning after the cover page.
5. Header beginning after the cover page, showing team number and name of assignment.
6. Where included, items labeled as Tables and referenced in your text.  Example – Table 3. Five year profit and loss statement.  Example – “see Table 3 for these numbers.”
7. Where included, figures numbered, labeled, and referenced in your text. 
8. The various sections of the assignment, where appropriate, well marked and identified by section headings.   Example –

4. Company Strengths.

9. Proper grammar, proper spelling, proper sentence structure and other considerations of style.
10. All components of content needed for the particular assignment.

Overall– good answers, in the instructor’s judgment, are those that present relevant facts, intelligently chosen and helpfully organized, that focus on strategic issues for the firm, and that display creative and independent thinking.

The instructor will grade the strategic audits on the following basis:

• accurate, highly relevant, and well organized presentation of facts concerning the firm’s strategic situation
• continuing focus on the history of the firm’s efforts to attain strategic advantage against its competition, particularly in the way it chooses to compete
• complete presentation of all the components of a strategic audit as shown in the textbook
• spell-checked writing, free of grammatical errors, and fairly free of clumsy writing (avoid unnecessary adjectives and adverbs, avoid unnecessary sentences, for example “Now we are going to present the next part of this material.” and so on.).
• time taken to think through what is interesting about the case and effort at original and creative solutions to problems, as shown in your arguments and conclusions
• focus on alternative strategic directions for the firm’s future and your demonstration, via the pro forma financial statement, of the preferred choice
• presentation of financial data in a format easy to understand and see at a glance.

Team critique of another team’s strategic audit.   

Your team will be assigned the role of presenting four critiques in class of another team’s strategic reports.  You will get either a hard copy or electronic copy of the other team’s work 48 hours before the class when the presentation occurs.  Your job is to provide a positive critique designed to help the other team improve their analysis.  This means you have to be familiar with the case study on which the other team is reporting.  One criterion governs this work, which I have already called “positive.” --  provide points of criticism wherever and only wherever you can present a clearly improved point of view on the item.  You are expected to find several such points for improvement.  A written copy of your critique is due in class on the date of the presentation.  Note my strong suggestion that you establish a sub-team to handle this part of your assignments.

SCHEDULE

HAVE A GREAT SUMMER OR A SUCCESSFUL GRADUATION OR BOTH