pick five companies from the fortune 500
Pick five companies from the Fortune 500 or S&P 500 and download their 10k report from their website. Once you download the reports, create an excel sheet where you list all those companies and you will start adding the following items to the excel sheet gradually:
1. Company’s mission and vision, core values, purpose.
2. Firm external environment key influential factors
3. Firm internal environment key factors
4. Five forces analysis using the framework provided in the book and Harvard materials
5. Firm value chain analysis
6. Firm key strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities
7. Firm governance structure
8. Firm CSR (Corporate social responsibility) reports
9. Firm R&D spending for the last 4-5 years
10. Firm competitive actions using news media search for terms like launched new products, mergers, acquisitions, marketing campaigns, etc.. for the last 4-5 years and try to have a numerical count of it.
11. Plot a graph of the firm’s R&D spending and the key financial ratios such as ROA, ROE, or Tobin’s Q
12. Do number 11 but between firm’s competitive actions using the numerical count and key financial ratios
13. Determine the future horizon for each company using innovative and creative thinking, and also using your knowledge about potential changes in the business landscape 10-20 years from now, be creative, imagine, ponder, and don’t be shy to assume whatever you think might happen because it actually just possible to happen.
14. Based upon your comprehensive understanding of the role of strategy, prepare an executive report outlining the company’s current status, past and current achievements, past problems and how they solved them and future possible problems and what should they do, past opportunities and how they approached them and future opportunities and how they might capitalize upon them.
Use APA formatting in your final submission. Your work must be thorough, supported with proper numbers extracted from credible sources such as reputable media outlets and company’s annual reports. YOUR ANALYSIS OF THE COMPANIES CURRENT COMPETITIVE STATUS MUST INCORPORATE THE FRAMEWORKS WE HAVE in MATERIALS SUCH AS DIAMOND MODEL. Complete citations is required for all sources. You must use graphs, figures, and models to show your professionalism in writing. When discussing the company’s competitiveness status, use comparison with its major competitors on the various categories you will use to examine and assess it’s competitiveness (making tables will make this easier for you).
