Strategic Management and Modelling Guiding Questions

1. Explain how developing a mission statement can help resolve divergent views among managers in a firm. Do
local service stations need to have written vision and mission statements? Why or why not?
2. Your university has fierce competitors. List three external opportunities and three external threats that face
your university.
3. When someone or some company is “on a mission” to achieve something, many times they cannot be
stopped. List three things in prioritized order that you are “on a mission” to achieve in life.
4. Why do you think organizations that have a comprehensive mission tend to be high performers? Does having
a comprehensive mission cause high performance?
5. In your opinion, what are the three most important components that should be included when writing a
mission statement? Why?
6. Drucker says the most important time to seriously reexamine the firm’s vision/mission is when the firm is
very successful explain how would the mission statements of a for-profit and a nonprofit organization differ?
7. How often do you think a firm’s vision and mission statements should be changed and what are the eight
benefits of having a clear mission statement.
8. Governments worldwide are turning to “protectionism” to cope with economic recession, imposing tariffs
and subsidies on foreign goods and restrictions/incentives on their own firms to keep jobs at home. What are
the strategic implications of this trend for international commerce?
9. Discuss the following statement: Major opportunities and threats usually result from an inter action among
key environmental trends rather than from a single external event or factor.
10. Identify two industries experiencing rapid technological changes and three industries that are experiencing
little technological change. How does the need for technological forecasting differ in these industries? Why?
11. How does the external audit affect other components of the strategic-management process?
12. As the owner of a small business, explain how you would organize a strategic-information scanning system.
How would you organize such a system in a large organization?
13. List the 10 external areas that give rise to opportunities and threats. As strategist for a local bank, explain
when you would use qualitative versus quantitative forecasts.
14. The global recession forced thousands of firms into bankruptcy. Does this fact alone confirm that “external
factors are more important than internal factors” in strategic planning?Discuss.
15. Are you more organized than the person sitting beside you in class? If not, what problems could that present
in terms of your performance and rank in the class? How analogous is this situation to rival companies?
16. How are the SWOT Matrix, SPACE Matrix, BCG Matrix, IE Matrix, and Grand Strategy Matrix similar?
How are they different?
17. How would for-profit and nonprofit organizations differ in their applications of the strategy formulation
framework?
18. List three limitations of the SWOT matrix and analysis.
19. Allocating resources can be a political and an ad hoc activity in firms that do not use strategic management.
Why is this true? Does adopting strategic management ensure easy resource allocation? Why?
20. As production manager of a local newspaper, what problems would you anticipate in implementing a
strategy to increase the average number of pages in the paper by 40 percent?
21. Strategy evaluation allows an organization to take a proactive stance toward shaping its own future. As
executive director of the state forestry commission, in what way and how frequently would you evaluate the
organization’s strategies?
22. Why is it important for all business majors to study strategic management since most students will never
become a chief executive officer nor even a top manager in a large company? Further compare business
strategy and military strategy
23. Think of an organization you’re familiar with to find out who are the major competitors? What are their
strengths and weaknesses? What are their strategies? How successful are these competitors compared to the
institution you are familiar with.