Skip to Main Content

BUS485: Strategic Business Policy I & II Capstone: Modules 7 & 8

Completing your Strategic Audit (SA)

Develop Strategic Alternatives

This week:

  • Develop 2-3 mutually exclusive strategic alternatives.
    • If appropriate you might propose one alternative for growth, one for stability, and one for retrenchment
  • Construct a corporate scenario for each alternative by using the factors from your EFAS, IFAS, & SFAS and doing additional research (see below) to project general societal trends and industry trends.
  • Using these trends as the basis of your assumptions, write pro forma financial statements for each strategic alternative
  • List the pros and cons for each alternative based on your scenarios

Develop Recommended Strategy

  • Specify which one of your alternative strategies you recommend. Justify your choice in terms of dealing with the strategic factors you determined (previous weeks)
  • Develop policies to help implement your strategies (see below)

Develop Strategic Alternatives

Questions to Ask Yourself:

  1. Can the current or revised objectives be met through more careful implementation of those strategies presently in use?
  2. What are the major feasible alternative strategies available to the corporation? What are the pros and cons of each? Can corporate scenarios be developed and agreed on? (Alternatives must fit the natural physical environment, societal environment, industry, and corporation for the next three to five years).
    • Consider stability, growth, and retrenchment as corporate strategies
    • Consider cost leadership and differentiation as business strategies
    • Consider any functional strategic alternatives that might be needed for the reinforcement of an important corporate or business strategic alternative.

Develop Recommended Strategy

Questions to Ask Yourself:

  1. Specify which strategic alternatives you are recommending for the corporate, business, and functional levels of the corporation. Do you recommend different business or functional strategies for different units of the corporation?
  2. Justify your recommendations in terms of its ability to resolve both long and short-term problems and effectively deal with the strategic factors.
  3. What policies should be developed or revised to guide effective implementation?
  4. What is the impact of your recommended strategy on the company's core and distinctive competencies?

Suggested Keywords for Effective Article Searches

Stability: risk management, organizational performance, performance evaluation, performance management, organizational effectiveness

Growth: corporate growth, expansion (business), organizational growth

Retrenchment: downsizing, financial crisis, organizational change, layoffs, corporate turnarounds

Cost leadership: cost effectiveness, cost control

Differentiation: competitive advantage

Example Searches

Try these searches in some of our Business-related databases:

For Strategic Alternatives

  • "corporate strateg*" AND "retail industry"
  • ("business planning" OR "strategic planning" AND "retail industry")
  • growth AND "motorcycle industry"
  • "retrenchment strategy"

For Recommended Strategy

  • "strategic planning" AND impact AND ("fast food industry" OR restaurants OR "food service")
  • ("strategic planning" OR "strategic alternatives") AND management
  • ("strategic planning" OR "strategic alternatives") AND marketing
  • "strategic planning" AND implementation AND (policy OR policies)
  • "strategic alternatives" AND implementation

WARNING!

Any information outside of the textbook must correspond to the dates of your case!

Do this by using the publication date filter available in the databases!