Assignment

Outline of Key Assignment

Your first task is to post your draft to the discussion area so that other students will be able to review your work. Attach your document to your main discussion post, and include any notes that you feel are appropriate in the post. The purpose of this assignment is to help improve the quality of your Key Assignment.

Key Assignment (1,000-1,250 words)

You have just been hired to the HBY Company as its new vice president of strategic planning. The corporation is a conglomerate with divisions in the film industry, theme park industry, digital music distribution industry, and mass merchandiser industry. The corporation has seen lackluster performance in recent years because its competitors seem to have a more effective strategy, and, at the same time, business and economic conditions have changed appreciably from what they were five years earlier.

Given the multibillion dollar size of the corporation and the fact that it is a conglomerate with a very diverse portfolio of companies in varying industries, the chief executive officer (CEO) to whom you report has already given you permission to hire a staff of recent Master of Business Administration (MBA) graduates to assist you in your efforts. You recently completed the interviewing and hired four people with minimal real business experience.

In coming months, you and your team will be creating a completely new-and, presumably, more effective-strategic plan. You plan to begin by holding a kick-off meeting with your team.

To feel confident that all of the employees in your strategic planning team understand all that you have taught them, you require each to prepare a streamlined version of the key elements of a strategic plan. You require each employee to prepare the following sections of a strategic plan for any one of the corporation's four divisions:

• Mission and Vision Statements (Simply copying from an existing real company is unacceptable.)
• Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Bound (SMART) Goals and Objectives
• Industry Analysis
• Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats, and Trends (SWOTT) Analysis
• A Perceptual Map

o Choose any criteria that you think are important to plot.
o Explain why you picked the criteria.

The 4 corporate industries that each employee can pick from are as follows:

• Film industry
• Theme park industry
• Mass merchandiser industry
• Digital music distributor industry

Your task is to create a plan, following the same parameters, which will be the sample standard that your employees' submissions should match.