Business Strategy

The 3 parts of the assignment Part A) Your corporate level strategy through the BSG – approx 40% of the paper Explain why your company used a certain strategy in specific situations in the Business Strategy Game. What were the concepts and tools applied? What analyses did you carry out and how, to in your decision making? How and why did you change your strategy throughout the game? What were the results of your actions? Write your analysis in a reflective way; that is, always keeping the question in mind: What would you have done differently in light of the outcomes? What do you think would have been a better course of action? And, ultimately, what did you learn about (crafting and executing) strategy? To accomplish a good level of reflection on these issues, you will need to employ the theories, concepts and methods learnt in the module. You may as well want to further your knowledge in and understanding of specific areas with the help of the articles listed in the module description or found elsewhere. Make sure that you base your reflective analysis on your class-by-class bullet point notes and numerical data, financial outcomes as well. You are also invited to cut and paste graphs and figures from the BSG reports into your essay. Pls note that without facts and figures proving your statements and analyses your paper is not valid. Part  B) Functional strategies – approx 40% of the paper Describe how in crafting the functional strategies used in the BSG you managed to make use of the theories and methods learnt in this module or modules of your own MSc programme. Highlight the connection of the company’s overall strategy with that of your particular field. How did the functional strategy that you were responsible for contribute to your results? What could you have done differently to reach better results? What linkages can you observe between your functional and competitive strategies? How do they interact and change one another? You are allowed to use other learnt analyses belonging to your function in this part. EG.: if you were marketing responsible you may use analysis learnt at marketing classes. The same if you were logistics of HR etc. If you use other subject’s frameworks you must refer them correctly. PLS NOTE THAT IF YOU DON’T APPLY AT LEAST ONE STRATEGY THEORY LEARNT (IDEALLY ONE IN THE CORPORATE AND ONE IN THE FUNCTIONAL PART) YOU MAY FAIL THE ASSIGNMENT! Part C) Group dynamics – approx 20% of the paper Give an account of the group dynamics. Did you have any challenges? How did you resolve those? What was your personal role in the game and in overcoming the difficulties? Were there any issues arising because of cultural differences that made you more aware of and/or sensitive to others? Have you identified any unspoken assumptions that influenced your actions and others’ reactions? Was there anything that you couldn’t say or you suppose others might not have said for some reason, any silent voices? What did you learn about yourself? A critically reflexive 3-step approach is described in Cunliffe (2004: 424)—“What Have You Been Struck By? A) Identify personal insights, issues, moments of critical questioning, and revelation/connection with ideas, moments, and comments (by you, other course members, your instructor) that struck you and offered the potential for reflective insight or significant learning. B) Describe why these are important to you. What impact did they have and/or what dilemmas, questions, or possibilities did they raise? Have these resulted in order or chaos for you?   C) So what are you going to do now? What issues, questions, and dilemmas are you going to explore further? Why and how? How will this influence who you are and how you relate to others? What relational nets can you construct/connect with to continue this rocess of reflective and critical learning?” Besides answering the previous questions you may want to read more about the topic to enhance your knowledge, self-reflection and writing.  I suggest three articles: – Argyris, C. (1977) Double Loop Learning in Organizations. Harvard Business Review 55(5), pp. 115-125.1 – Cunliffe, A.L. (2004) On Becoming a Critically Reflexive Practitioner. Journal of Management Education 28(4), pp. 407-426. – Drucker, P.F. (1999) Managing oneself. Harvard Business Review 77(2), pp. 65-74.