Question

Strategic planning is the process of developing and maintaining a strategic fit between the organization’s goals and capabilities and its changing marketing opportunities. Strategic planning sets the stage for the rest of the planning in the firm. Companies typically prepare annual plans, long-range plans, and strategic plans.

Question ONE -  Word count: 1000 words

Select an organization of your choice preferably an Arab world example, and:

1- Write a brief description about your chosen organization, its products, and activities.

2- Define strategic planning and explain in details the four steps that your chose transition is practicing ‎through the strategic planning process.

3- Discuss the role marketing plays in this process.

4- Include a diagram to illustrate your answer.

Question TWO - Word count: 500 words

Describe the Boston Consulting Group’s approach to portfolio analysis. ‎Include a diagram to illustrate your answer. Also, briefly discuss why management may find it difficult to dispose of a ‘question mark.’

Answer 1

I am answering the first two points of the first question.

The organization that has been selected in this paper is Toyota Motors one of the well-known automobile brands in the world. Toyota Motors was established in 1937 by Kichiiro Toyoda. It is a multinational automobile corporation based in Japan. This is the largest organization in terms of market share in the world that accounts for 10%. The headquarter of the company is in Toyota City, Japan. It offers commercial vehilces, luxury vehicles, automobiles, engine, hybrid electronic vehicle in the market. It has also registered the record of producing 10 million vehicle per year.

Strategic planning can be defind as an organizational management activity that is used by organizations in order to focus enregy as well as resources, set priorities, strengthen operation, establish agreement towards intended goals of the organization, and ensure every employee and stakeholders are working towards acheiving the organizational goals and objectives. Toyota Motors significanlty focuses on strategic planning process in order to determine the success of the organization. It practices the following four steps through the strategic planning process.

Environmental scanning: Toyota Motors collects and analyze information related to its business environment so that it can identify key factors that can affect the performance and productivity of the organization at large. It helps the organization to identify potential opportunities as well as threats available in its business environment. With the help of this, the organziation gets a clear picture of current landscape of the industry. Thus, based on the result, the organization sets its goals and objectives and formulate strategies to achieve that.

Strategy formulation: Based on the information collected in the first step that is environmental scanning, the organization focuses on formulating strategies in order to achieve the goals and objectives. Toyota Motors focuses on maximizing the opportunities available in the market along with minimizing the threats. This step also helps the organization to identify the area in which the organization needs to invest and improve the efficiency and effectiveness fo the organization.

Strategy Implementation: After formulating strategy, Toyota Motors gives extensive emphasis on implementing the strategy. This is also the most important part of the strategic planning. Toyota Motors focuses on communicating the strategy and the required change throughout the organization so that everyone within the organization could be aware of the action and activities of the organization. Implementing strategies is a very risky task, hence Toyota identifies all potential risks that may involve in the process and design activities to deal with those risks.

Strategy Evaluation: Toyota Motors always strives for continous improvement. Hence, after implementing the strategies, it evaluates the effectiveness fo the strategy. It believes in significant monitoring of the strategy throughout the process so that the strategy can lead the organization to achieve the intended goals and objectives. It also helps in identifying loopholes in the strategy and taking corrective actions to make the strategy effective.