Strategy Formulation and Implementation for Ford Motor car company

Assignment 4: Strategy Formulation and Implementation (for the competitor Ford: Due 1November 8th)
Do not use strategies that are already in progress, but ones developed by you to move forward for the next five years based on the environmental scan of the strategic plan.
You will start this assignment with the stakeholder analysis to identify the key stakeholders’ interest in and relative power to influence company’s activities. You will then develop a TOWS matrix in order to identify the corporate strategy alternatives (see chapter 8-10) and then perform an SBU analysis to identify the investment and business-level strategy for each SBU, aligned with the corporate strategy.
At this point, you should select one of the SBUs that you want to focus on for strategy implementation and identify functional strategies for the selected SBU that are needed to implement developed corporate and business-level strategies. To implement your strategies you need to consider how to allocate your resources. These include the organizational (including marketing, operations, and innovations – can be R&D or IT or both), financial, human resources, and other requirements that will go into making sure the organization has the competencies for sustainability (think about how Barney and other strategists talk about making sure that resources are rare, valuable, not imitated, and that processes are complex). You will also want to consider the skills and characteristics of both your leaders and employees needed to support your solution. I would suggest looking at the Competing Values Framework and the culture of the organization to optimize implementation of your strategy. The final part of your implementation plan will also include the organizational structure and design needed to support your corporate and business-level strategies. Chapters 6 & 8-10 in Rothaermel describe the corporate and business-level strategies.
Did you remember to do most or all these things:
– Stakeholder Analysis – use 2×2 power-interest grid for your assessment of key stakeholders
– TOWS Matrix – includes corporate level strategy alternatives (same as the SWOT Matrix presented in Exhibit 4.11, page 147, of Rothaermel)
– Recommended corporate strategy based on evaluation of alternatives from TOWS
– SBU analysis – use Boston Consulting Group (BCG) or GE Matrix; include investment and business-level strategies for each SBU recommended by you
– Global strategy (or world market strategy) if serving beyond domestic market. Discuss company benefits and risks associated with the recommended global strategy. See Chapter 10 of Rothaermel for global strategies.
Now that you have defined your strategy, you need to thing about how to implement that strategy. This is not what the firm has already been doing but how you plan on moving forward with the strategy that you have identified to solve the strategic problem. Thus this assignment should demonstrate your ability to critically evaluate the situation, allocate human capital, and apply decision making tools. For example, you may have been working on a multi-attribute problem for which the trade-offs (more profit, less risk, better strategic fit, better strategic platform for the future, etc.) are not well defined. In that case, you may want to offer multiple solutions, each better at achieving different sub-goals, and choose the optimum choice using decision making theory. You may also want to apply decision making theory to help narrow down multiple and equally good solutions to the problem.
– Markets to be served for your SBU for which you will be describing the implementation of the strategy above (be clear which SBU you plan to be the focus for this part of the strategy plan) – be consistent with the mission and the strategy.
– Functional strategies for your SBU that are aligned with and support the implementation of company’s corporate and business-level strategies. Clearly state which SBU you focus on for this part of the strategic plan.
Marketing strategy – target markets to be served; growth or stability strategies.
Operations strategy – operational decisions to be made to achieve long term competitive advantage
Financial strategy – decisions to finance strategy implementation; allocation of financial resources
Innovation/ R&D strategy – decisions on product and process innovation and improvement; how new technology should be accessed – through internal development, external acquisition, or strategic alliances.
IS/IT strategy – systems to be used to support strategy implementation
HR strategy – skills and characteristics of leaders and employees; allocation of human resources
– Organizational culture as defined by the Competing Values Framework (CVF) of the organization
– Organizational structure needed to support your corporate, business, and global strategies – e.g. simple structure, functional structure, multidivisional structure, matrix structure