Blog

• Provide a brief introduction and history of the company with a focus on understanding where it is positioned and what major challenges it faces today?
• By history, I do not mean a chronological re-telling, but crucial points that have made your company distinctive and shaped the way in which your company competes: its organizational capabilities or heritage.  (Do not just reiterate the company chronology.)
• For many companies, the original founder still shapes in terms of values and ideas the direction of a company such as Apple did under Steve Jobs.
• Do not spend 2-3 pages reiterating the company history unless is it relevant for the future.

The Mission, Visions, Goals, And Strategies Of The Corporation And Of Its Business Units

• What do they mean in actuality?
• What is the company doing to realize them?

Stakeholders

• Who are the major (most powerful) stakeholders in your organization?

Board Of Directors

• Stead & Stead (2014, 233-234) list five functions of a Board of Directors.  Who is responsible for these functions at your target organization?  How well are they doing?

1. … they are responsible for overseeing the strategic direction of the firm.
2. They are responsible for auditing the financial performance of their firms, including being responsible for ensuring that the audited financial statements represent a true and accurate picture of the firm. This is essentially their watchdog role.
3. They are responsible for the selection and succession of CEOs as well as the determination of CEO pay. If the CEO loses their confidence, they are responsible for replacing him/her.
4. They are responsible for assessing risks and developing strategies that mitigate risks.
5. They are responsible for ensuring the ethics and legality of the firms’ activities, thus building and preserving repetitional capital

• What specific capabilities does your board of directors bring to the boardroom table? What are they trying to do with their appointments?
• How does the board look through the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion?

Executive Team

• Include an analysis of company CEO.
• Analyze your executive team. Is it diverse?
• Find statements they have made to the press, interviews, speeches to their shareholders or employees.
• Stead & Stead (2014) argue that leaders should be humble, ethical, spiritual, and have the attitude of a servant. To what degree does the organization’s leadership reflect these attributes?
• According to Stead & Stead (2014) “Successfully implementing SSM requires that strategic managers create and maintain effective sustainability-centered relationships within their firms and among their interconnected plethora of stakeholders (p. 246).”  How effective is the organization’s top leadership at creating and maintaining such relationships?

Organizational Structure

• Describe the overall organizational structure of the company?
• What business units or functional areas does the organization have and how much of their sales (monies) go to each area?

Strategic Evaluation And Control

• Stead & Stead note that “Strategic evaluation and control processes are used to implicitly and explicitly evaluate whether or not a firm’s strategy is achieving its intended results (p. 237).”
• Evaluate your target company’s strategic evaluation and control processes across the Triple Bottom Line: People, Profit, and Planet.  For data on People and Profit, your best source will probably be the company’s Corporate Social Responsibility Report, but they may also have a site for sustainability reporting.