Overview: The executive memorandum assignment requires your careful consideration of an appropriate, sensible investment project for your chosen company.
Furthermore, this assignment will develop and demonstrate your ability to find useful, authoritative information sources about your selected company, its industry, its economic environment, and the particular investment opportunity.
Prompt: Write a memo about the expansion opportunity for which you will request funding in your final project proposal. This paper should include only a simple narrative description.
List your key information sources about the organization you have chosen for your final project, explaining in one to two sentences each how the source is relevant to your project. Your memo should identify the source (not just a website address) plus, in general, describe what information that source can reliably provide. Your sources must be authoritative. The company’s (Nordstrom) own website is an authoritative source for its own public financial and other information, for example.
Serious business or economic sites, such as Bloomberg, or industry trade journals can be authoritative sources for fairly unbiased news about the organization or its industry. Other reliable sources could educate you about the business environment in your project’s target country (e. g., the CIA World Factbook).
Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed:
Include a narrative overview of your expansion opportunity. Describe the expansion project, the country in which the expansion will take place, and the reasoning behind this expansion into this country at this particular time. In other words, why does this particular project and country make sense for your chosen company?
Include key information sources related to the company you have chosen. Sources should provide an introductory, authoritative, future-oriented understanding of the company itself, the industry, technology, customers, suppliers and competitors, and the economic environment of the company and of your proposed expansion. Sources could be published or online; they could even include a person you know with experience in that industry. The sources will almost certainly include the company’s website; you might also follow its Facebook and Twitter feeds.
Note how each source is relevant and describe what information the source will provide. You will probably develop more sources later in the course, but these are meant to give you a solid start.
