ABC Strategic Plan Documentation

You have just been hired to the ABC company as its new vice president of strategic planning. The corporation is a conglomerate with divisions in the auto industry, pharmaceutical industry, home movie rental industry, and mass merchandiser industry. The corporation has seen lackluster performance in recent years because its competitors seem to have a more effective strategy, and, at the same time, business and economic conditions have changed appreciably from what they were 5 years earlier.

Given the multibillion dollar size of the corporation and the fact that it is a conglomerate with a very diverse portfolio of companies in varying industries, the CEO whom you report to has already given you permission to hire a staff of recent MBAs to assist your efforts. You recently completed the interviewing and hired four people with minimal real business experience.

In coming months, you and your team will be creating a completely new—and, presumably, more effective—strategic plan. You plan to begin by holding a kick-off meeting with your team.

Part 1

Deliverable Length: 1,200-1,500 words

To feel confident that all of the employees in your strategic planning team understand all that you have taught them, you require each to prepare a streamlined version of the key elements of a company's strategic plan. You require each employee to prepare the following sections of a strategic plan for any one of the corporation's four divisions. You intentionally gave them no information about any of the divisions and suggest that they pick a current leading competitor in that field, and are to assume they are in that company as they write the following parts of a strategic plan:

Mission statement (simply copying an existing real company's mission is unacceptable)
Industry analysis
SWOTT analysis
2 perceptual maps
Choose any 2 pairs of criteria that you think are important to plot.
Explain why you picked those 2 pairs of criteria.
The 4 corporate industries that each employee can pick from are the following:

Auto industry
Pharmaceutical industry
Mass merchandiser industry
Home movie rental industry

Part 2

Deliverable Length: 4 or more blank forms (minimum 1-page each), a complete set of instructions for each form, (200-300 words minimum), and a 200-300 word cover letter

Your team has practiced doing strategic planning for a competitor company in an associated industry. The team has done the preliminary work of learning about the process of strategic planning and is now set to begin the necessary preparatory work to assist each division's senior management team in creating its own strategic plan.

You and your team are now ready to assist in the strategic planning process with each division's senior staff. Your team knows that a massive amount of information will need to be collected and collated as part of each division's individual strategic plan. Ahead of your team's visit to each division's headquarters, you are preparing a package of forms and instructions to disseminate to each division head. The purpose of this package is to have each division's senior staff do the necessary legwork to prepare for the week-long strategic planning meetings that you will hold at each site. You want to make sure that each division's staff knows what they have to do, what information they have to collect, and how to present it in a consistent manner. In this fashion, each division's strategic plans will have a consistent look and feel.

Create the necessary blank forms that the management team will need to fill out to gather the appropriate data. At a minimum, the following forms will be needed:

Industry analysis
SWOTT analysis
Competitor analysis and perceptual map
Five year financial forecast
Provide one set of clear and concise written instructions for the division senior teams to assist them in how to gather the information and transfer it to the appropriate forms for subsequent discussion and collation into the final 5-year strategic plan document. Each form's instructions must be 200-300 words and include examples to help explain how to fill it out.

One cover letter of 200-300 words must be included and addressed to the CEO, who will then distribute the materials and instructions to the senior teams of each division regarding the overall process his or her team will be going through, culminating in a formal strategic planning meeting that you and your team will participate in.

To keep decision making as decentralized as possible, draft 2 policy statements, each of 100-200 words, that each division's CEO will be asked to disseminate and comply with. They must both comply with the following policy-writing guidelines:

One policy statement must address human resource promotion policy.
One policy must address capital spending authority levels.