Assignment With Peer Review: Five-Forces and Blue Ocean Strategy Analysis for Your Organization

Now it is time to apply lessons learned from this week's case analysis and Discussion about competitive force assessment, this week's readings, and other resources, to help you think about how you might answer the question, how will you win? (How will you create unique value?)

To prepare for this Discussion:

Review all required readings, including the Weekly Briefing, which provides additional guidance on how to complete the Assignment.

Review this week's case study and peer discussion.

Identify and review all relevant readings from the MBA Capstone Program Bibliography.

Locate and maintain access to publicly available information about your organization.

Based on what you've learned from this week's case analysis, readings, resources, and discussions with your peers and faculty member, post a polished and synthesized discussion response, which will also become part of your Strategy Playbook for Extraordinary Results.

You should include in your response and analysis:

A set of specific, future and action-oriented strategy recommendations, with related metrics, that would help the organization improve its performance.

You should support these recommendations with a preliminary argument as to how and why your proposed actions/strategies could help the organization.

At minimum, you should explicitly consider the following prompts to help you construct your specific strategy recommendations and supporting arguments:

What insights did you gain, and what did you learn from this week's resources and your "Apple in 2013" case analysis and peer discussion that you can apply to your Strategy Playbook for your chosen organization?

What context differences are important between the case example and your organization? What assumptions do you need to make in order to use the concepts appropriately?

Given your chosen organization, what concepts, tools, and readings from the MBA Program Capstone Bibliography are most relevant to helping guide how you might recommend improving the company? How and why are they relevant?

NOTE: Explain why your recommendations are SMART-- specific, measurable, realistic (feasible) and timely (relevant).

General Guidance: Your original discussion post for the Capstone Forum will typically be 1 to 1 ½ single-spaced pages, excluding references. Refer to the Week 5 Discussion 2 rubric for grading elements and criteria. Your Instructor will use the rubric to assess your work.

Note: After you receive input from your colleagues in the next few days, you should revise your original post to reflect input that you think is helpful and strengthens your position. This final revised version from this week's Capstone Forum will become the fourth formal entry into your Strategy Playbook appendix. Title this section "Competitive Force Analysis for XYZ [Insert Organization Name]," and be sure to keep a version of your response in your Strategy Playbook template. As a best practice you should plan to review your playbook throughout the course as you continue to build your components. You may find that you have new ideas and items that further improve your work.