A "Quick Dirty" Strategic Audit.
In teaching Strategic Management, it is imperative that students first learn how to audit the firm before they begin analysis, planning and implementation. Unfortunately this is a step often overlooked. Without a complete and up to date audit, any analysis conducted would have questionable validity and reliability. This report focuses on an instructional tool that faculty can utilize to guide students through a strategic audit of a company. The objective in auditing the organization is to describe the firm in terms of its current position in the industry, its strategy, structure, and performance. This paper describes the Company Profile Sheet and explains how it can be an invaluable tool for the students to understand the company under review and the strategic management concepts. Dorothy E. Brawley A "QUICK DIRTY" STRATEGIC AUDIT 16 Journal of Learning in Higher Education 17 Fall 2016 (Volume 12 Issue 2) TERMINOLOGY Strategic Management is usually taken at the end of the program of study in business the capstone experience. Although students taking this course have been exposed to the basic concepts of business in their core courses (Management, Accounting, Finance, Marketing, Economics, Information Systems) their ability to apply those concepts in an integrative way into a company study is limited. Because of the dynamic and complex nature of the field of strategy there are many concepts and variables students must consider in conducting a strategic audit of a firm. Exposure to such concepts as company demographicssector, trading, company type, industry classification, distribution areas tend to be abstract concepts, not grounded in application. Strategic concepts including corporate/ business/functional level strategies, structural forms, and process strategies tend to be new variables to students, covered superficially in earlier courses but forgotten. Performance indicators including an ability to really look at balance sheets, income statements and ratios, analyzed and memorized for tests in earlier courses, have long been put aside as unimportant. Additionally, students tend to have been exposed to text cases, where data is available in a concise, problem specific context. Reality is not written like a textbook case. Asking students to learn to pull current data from real company documents like the annual reports and 10k may be a new experience for them. OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS AND METRICS It is one thing to be exposed to the concepts it is another to understand the metrics required to operationalize those concepts. Most Strategic Management texts give theoretical definitions of terminology. My objective in developing the template with definitional instructions was to give the students a guide with operational metrics for each of the variables under audit.