MIS 44285 Summer 2010 Weinroth

M & IS 44285: Integrated Business Policy/Strategy

Summer III 2010 CRN 11759 (Section 030)

213 BSA  MTWH 12:00 – 1:55 pm

Instructor: Dr. Jay Weinroth

mailto:gweinroth@gmail.com

Office hours: TBA.

TEXTBOOK: The textbook for this course is the Second 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– 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 day of class.  You will then organize an e-mail communication procedure within your team.  I will also have an e-mail address for each member of the teams.

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 can leave messages for me by calling the office of Management and Information Systems, 330 672-1140, Department Senior Secretary Ms. Pam Silliman.

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) to ensure you are properly enrolled in this class and section.  Should you find an error in your class schedule, correct the error with your advising office.  If registration errors are not corrected 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.  Check with the Undergraduate Programs Office of the College of Business 330 672-2872.

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.    Check with the Undergraduate Programs Office of the College of Business 330 672-2872, concerning the course withdrawal deadline for Summer III.   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

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 20 points of your grade.  A point will be awarded for each class session you attend.  There are specifics about this component of your grade.  You must be in your assigned seat no later than 12; 15 (although the instructor will start class promptly– this allows for traffic mishaps and the like), you must be present in class for all the activity and you must remain awake.  This is an all or nothing point award – you won’t get a half point for showing up for half of class, etc.  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).

In the schedule of course activities included below in this syllabus, there are five entries marked SUBMIT.  For the team presentations on your case study corporations, each of our four teams will sub-divide for (a) presentation of your team’s analysis and (b) a critique of that presentation aimed at improving on shortcomings.  As indicated in the course activities schedule by the all caps notation SUBMIT, after each presentation each team will submit a written report, which includes the following:

• Initial presentation
• Critique
• Reconciliation of presentation and critique
• Assignment of individual grades and JUSTIFICATION

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 each report in 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.

SCHEDULE