Reference no: EM133087016

MGT440 You have announced your retirement and the Chairperson of your board has asked you to write a memo to the board recommending a strategic path going forward for your StratSim firm. Your task is to scope the most consequential opportunities and challenges for your company using strategic concepts, tools and techniques to conduct your analysis. Consistent with your analysis, you will then offer a strategic recommendation to the board that is realistic, integrated and considers interdependencies across multiple organizational domains.

Your memo should include all of the elements listed below using specific evidence and information to support your analysis and recommendation while staying focused and concise. Your goal is to demonstrate that you understand the course concepts and tools. To that end, your responses should make explicit use of our course concepts, tools and techniques. You can incorporate figures and tables to more concisely present your comprehensive analyses. In addition, your memo should use evidence to build your analyses and arguments.

Your response must be well written and reflect your own individual work. Please review the rubrics associated with the assignment for detailed grading criteria. The file you upload to Bb must be in .doc, .docx or .pdf format. This exam is open now and due at the end time of our scheduled exam period, meaning it is due no later than December 9th @ 7.20 pm. Late submissions will not be accepted.

1. Provide a brief introductory explanation of your company's current business situation and identify the most salient business challenges.

2. Conduct a comprehensive PEST analysis OR 5-forces analysis to analyze the external environment. Use specific evidence from the simulation to support your analysis.

3. Conduct a comprehensive Capability Analysis for your firm OR Strategy Map Analysis (map must be made by you at the firm level such that it includes all firms in the industry. You cannot use the product-level competitive maps provided in the simulation) to analyze your competitive position. Use specific evidence from the simulation to support your analysis.

4. Synthesize the most significant opportunities, threats, strengths and weaknesses from your analyses of the external environment (from #2) and your competitive position (from #3).

5. Develop an integrated strategic recommendation that would logically flow from your analyses. Your recommendation should:

- Be specific, innovative and interesting

- Target a business-level and/or corporate level strategy and articulate the associated benefits (e.g value creation along the value chain for business-level strategies, economies of scope and/or scale for corporate level strategies).

- Identify which mode (build, buy or partner) you think will be most beneficial to implement your recommended strategy and explain the advantages of the mode you choose

- Fully consider ethical/social and global implications

Please note that while your analysis can only draw on the information and data you have through the simulation, your strategic recommendation does not have to be limited to the decisions you are able to make in the simulation (e.g., you can recommend a type of diversification or vertical strategy using buy or partner mode)