SECTION 1: THE ORGANIZATIONAL PROFILE—PART 1

Capstone Assignment Overview: Strategy Playbook for Exceptional Results

In this Capstone experience, you will develop a strategy playbook for a selected organization. You may be familiar with the concept of a playbook as it relates to a sports team, but what might that mean for a business? The Strategy Playbook for Exceptional Results is a roadmap, of sorts, that can help an organization achieve excellence, respond to challenges, and attain short-term and long-term goals. The organization you choose for this exercise could be an organization for which you have worked (or hope to work in the future) and for which there is adequate information available to complete all necessary sections of the playbook. For the Module 1 Assignments, you will begin work on the Strategy Playbook for Exceptional Results that you will build during the 8 weeks of this course. In this playbook, you will draw upon the knowledge and skills you have gained throughout your MBA program to provide your selected company’s leadership with an analysis of the organization, as well as your recommendations for changes the company could make over the coming years to improve its organizational performance. The final compilation of your Strategy Playbook for Exceptional Results will be tangible evidence that you can put your MBA education to use, and it will provide you with a template for how you can help any organization achieve exceptional results.

Important Note: This playbook could be a helpful tool for any organization that is experiencing a problem, either internal or external. Please note that your selected organization may not be currently experiencing any known issues; however, you could bring to the table certain common issues. For example, your organization could be experiencing a decline in sales and losing its once abundant target market, or, internally, the organization could be experiencing a high turnover in the operations department, and the recent climate survey showed a decline in morale throughout the organization. These examples are not all-inclusive to an organization, but they may be present in some form. For the purposes of this exercise, you are at liberty to use your creativity to craft an issue the organization is facing. Be sure to consider the different functional areas, or business units, within the organization to ensure that you are doing a thorough analysis.

With those thoughts in mind, your task for the final playbook is to use the knowledge and skills you have developed throughout this program to perform an analysis of the organization (Section 1), assess its readiness for change and improvement (Section 2), and then develop strategic recommendations for how the organization can overcome its challenges and achieve greater organizational performance (Section 3). 

Section 1: The Organizational Profile—Part 1

For the Assignments in this module, you will play the role of a consultant who has been brought in by the CEO of your selected organization to lead a tiger team. A tiger team is an efficient, highly motivated, and diverse team created to solve or troubleshoot specific major issues facing your organization. The Assignment will be a building block for the playbook that you will develop as you work through the rest of this course. Your final, synthesized Strategy Playbook for Exceptional Results is due at the end of Week 8, and it represents what can be thought of as a form of “due diligence analysis,” where you are stepping into the role of a consultant to a senior leadership team and are preparing a forward-looking, crisp, and impactful evaluation of where you think the company ought to be going over the next 5 years or so—and how it might get there.

In the Assignments for this module, you will complete Section 1 of your playbook in which you will analyze your selected organization’s culture, social and economic climate, and overall purpose. This week, you will begin to compile Section 1 of your playbook. Be sure to address the requirements for Part 1, and include specific examples (where appropriate) and relevant citations from the Learning Resources or from others throughout the program, the Walden Library, and/or other appropriate academic sources to support your work.