Evaluate specific company strategies and analyze the impact on competitive advantage and financial performance; Demonstrate careful reasoning for strategic initiatives using the tools of external and internal analysis
Hence, creating a strategic analysis of a company’s situation will help you develop the skills to synthesize diverse information and so reason critically about potential solutions. Such skills are necessary for effective business management. The task is to create a written analysis containing the following three aspects:
An identification of the company’s strategy, referencing course concepts (e.g. business-level strategy, five elements of strategy, international strategy)
An explication of the strategic issues facing the company, derived from an analysis of the external environment and internal organization (i.e. SWOT analysis)
A recommendation plan for dealing with the issues explicated (i.e. detailed options that weigh the benefits and costs of the proposal)
A few points of clarification:
The format is a typed document (12-point font, double-spaced text), should be roughly three pages in length.
Students should read the case materials below on Alphabet: Reorganizing Google. We will discuss how Google re-organized into Alphabet following an aggressive process of product diversification. The Company’s ambitions in hardware, drones, and health extended the company far from its Google search core, thereby challenging the mission to organize the world’s information. The organization change was intended to help its businesses operate more efficiently. We will address the following issues:
In response to increasing pressure from investors and in the face of stagnant share prices, Google announced an unusual restructuring plan in October 2015. It created a new firm – Alphabet, Inc. – to act as a holding company for Google and quite a few other independent subsidiaries under the Alphabet umbrella.
Has the reorganization addressed investors’ concerns, specifically whether Google’s investments in new projects have yielded attractive returns?
Has innovation actually improved under the new organizational structure for these risky bets on new technology and products?
Are the businesses financially stronger and more likely to succeed under the holding company structure?
How should Alphabet manage its product diversification moving forward? Should the company be more focused on developing moonshot projects that support the company’s core activity of creating audiences for ads? How does the company integrate technological advances in artificial intelligence across a wide range of businesses and products?
To learn about Google’s re-organization into Alphabet, please read the following articles:
https://hbr.org/2015/08/why-google-became-alphabet
https://abc.xyz/investor/
