Topic 1 Corporate mission, stakeholders, ethics and social responsibility 1 ) Find out whether your company has a formal mission statement. Does this statement define the business, identify major goals and articulate the corporate philosophy? 2a) If your company lacks a mission statement, what do you think its mission statement should be? 2b) If your company has a mission statement, do you consider it appropriate, given the material discussed in this chapter? 3) Identify the main stakeholder groups in your company. What claims do they place on the company? How is youf company trying 'to satisfy those claims?

Topic 2 External analysis: industry opportunities and threats 1) Apply the five forces model to the industry in which your company is based. What does this model tell you about the nature of competition in the industry? 2) Are any changes taking place in the macro environment that may have an impact, either positive or negative, on the industry in which your company is based? If so, what are these changes? How will they affect the industry? 3) Identify any strategic groups that may exist in the industry. How does the intensity of competition differ across the strategic groups you have identified?

Topic 3 Internal analysis: resources, capabilities, competencies and competitive advantage 1) identify whether your company has a competitive advantage or disadvantage in its primary industry. (Its primary industry is the one in which it has the most sales.) 2) Evaluate your company against the four generic building blocks of competitive advantage: efficiency, quality, innovation and customer responsiveness. How does this exercise help you understand the perfomlance of your company relative to that of its competitors? 3) What are the distinctive competencies of your company?

Topic 4 Building competitive advantage through functional strategy 1) Is your company pursuing any of the efficiency-increasing practices discussed in this chapter? 2) Is your company pursuing any of the quality-increasing practices discussed in this chapter? 3) Is your company pursuing any of the innovation-increasing practices discussed in this chapter?

Topic 5 Competitive business-level strategy and industry environment 1) How differentiated are the products or services of your company? What is the basis of their differentiated appeal? 2) What is your company's strategy towards market segmentation? If it segments its market, on what basis does it do so? 3) What distinctive competencies does your company have? (To answer this question, use the topic 5 information on functional-level strategy). Is efficiency, quality, innovation, responsiveness to customer or a combination of these factors the main driver in your company?

Topic 6 Corporate strategy: vertical integration, diversification and strategic alliances 1) How vertically integrated is your company? If your company does have vertically integrated operations, is it pursuing a strategy of taper of full integration? 2) How diversified is your company? If your company is already diversified, is it pursuing a related diversification strategy, an unrelated diversification strategy or a mix of the two? 3) Assess the potential for our company to create value through vertical integration. In reaching your assessment, also, consider the bureaucratic costs of managing vertical integration.

Topic 7 Designing organization structure 1) How large is the company as measured by number of employees? How many levels in the hierarchy does it have from the top to the bottom? 2) Based on these two measured and any other information you have, would you say your company operates with a relatively tall or flat structure? What effect does this have on people's behavior? 3) Draw an organizational chart showing the main way in which your company groups its activities. Based on this chart, with what kind of structure (hnctional or division) does your company operate?

Topic 8 Matching structure and control, culture and reward systems to strategy 1) What the sources of your company's distinctive competencies? Which functions are most important to it? How does your company design its structure at the functional level to improve its a) efficiency, b) quality, c) innovation and d) responsiveness to customer? 2) What is your company's business-level strategy? How does the company design its structure and control systems to improve and support its business-level strategy? What steps does it take, for example, to further cross-functional integration? Does it have a functional, product or matrix structure? 3) How does your compa~ly's culture support its strategy?

Topic 9 Managing strategic change 1) Find example of recent changes in your company's strategy or structure. What types of change did your company implement? Why did your company make these changes? 2) What do you think, are the major obstacles to change in your company? 3) Given the nature of your company? Can you find any example of conflicts that have occurred in your company?

Topic 10 Evaluating strategy performance 1) Identify a strategy that your company has implemented. 2) Find out whether your company has evaluated this strategy. 3) Identify the type of evaluation process - intended or emergent - that your company has followed.

Topic 11 The global challenges for competing in global markets, local markets & cultural variations and Export strategies 1) Strategies (License Strategies franchising strategies, rnulti country orgariization global strategies) 2) Guidelines for success as a global competitor.

Topic 12 How Corporate Governance Affects Strategy of Corporations: Lessons from Enron Corporation

Topic 13 Strategy implementation in the coilstruction industry

1) Strategy implementation and control process

Topic 14 Project implementation and control procedures, resources allocation 1) Issues In implementation 2) Procedure of strategy implementation