Individual Report

You will be required to complete an individual report based on concepts and strategies you learn
in this course as well as your own research. This assignment particularly requires that you
interview a senior level employee (manager or higher) to understand their perspective of
business problems and their potential strategies and solutions. This will help you connect your
course concepts and models to real-world scenarios.

Directions
1. Find a manager in a field or industry of your choice.
2. Ensure that manager works at an organization which has existed for at least 5 years.
3. Reach out to manager for interview. Ensure that you schedule the interview in advance of
planned start date for writing your report.
4. Use template provided in assessment section on LEARN to fill out important information
regarding interviewee selection and submit to the Dropbox by the end of week 7 (Sunday,
October 22 by 11:59 pm ET). You are welcome to submit your templates before Week 7
if you want to get a head start on interviews.
5. Once you receive approval, please interview the selected manager.
6. You can choose to conduct either a fully structured interview (all questions prepared
ahead of time, no deviations from script) OR a semi-structured interview (have some pre-
set questions, but also see where the discussion leads and seek deeper insights by asking
additional questions).
7. Begin writing a report to combine interview insights and your own research about the
organization this manager works for/in, and how the activities in that organization
contribute to overall vision of the organization as well as to general strategic management
principles.
8. Connections need to be made between course learning, interviews, and your research to
score maximum points.
9. Please follow APA formatting and style guidelines (see below). The Main Body (content)
of your report must be a maximum of 10 pages. In addition to the Main Body of your
report, you must also include a Title Page, Abstract and References.
10. The individual essay will be worth 25% of your grade. Please see the Rubric to
understand further expectations.
11. Reports are due on December 5th, 11:59 pm ET.

Research and References

This report requires that you engage in additional reading and research in addition to the
interview that you conduct with a manager. When students reference this additional reading in
their discussions, cases and essays, students are required to appropriately cite their sources. For
this course, references and in-text citations must follow the American Psychological Association
(APA) style guide.

APA formatting and style guide:

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/ge
neral_format.html
If you need help finding resources for this course, you can also use the library website:
https://uwaterloo.ca/library/find-resources