Current Event Exercises
I Making the Connection (Current Event Exercises). Every individual student is required to submit three making the connection reports. The purpose of this assignment is to analyze critically (not summarize) a recent article(s) that illustrates one or more key issues, concepts, challenges, and problems that we have discussed during the course. The article should be a major article (not articles that are 1 or 2 paragraphs in length) and have relevance to assigned strategic management topics. The article should be published on or after January 1, 2015. There are seven scheduled making the connection rounds. Each round of the assignment will be based upon certain assigned chapter(s), which can be identified through both the course schedule (see below) and the assignment schedule, which is listed under the “assignments” tab on Blackboard. Your report must provide a “so what” or what you’ve learned from the article. Presenting one or more examples of a certain concepts will not be enough to meet the minimum requirements of this assignment. You must critically analyze one or more concepts from the assigned readings and demonstrate how this concept is connected to the core story discussed in the article. You have to gather relevant information for your report from one or more of the following high quality business press outlets; Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Barrons Magazine, Financial Times, The Economist, Business 2.0, http://money.cnn.com/, http://www.cnbc.com/, and/or http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business/. I require that you read from the previous list because the depth of reporting and insights provided by the major papers exceed most of the capabilities of the regional and some national papers. Articles published in any other sources will not be accepted. It is the student’s responsibility to make sure that the article meets the conditions of the publishing source, publishing time, and relevance to the assigned corresponding readings that are presented in both the course schedule (see below) and the assignment schedule (located under the “assignments” tab in Bb). Failing to meet any of these three conditions will result in a grade of zero on the assignment. At the beginning of the semester, the instructor will assign each student to only three of the scheduled nine making the connection rounds. The dates of your three reports will be available in the “Assignment” area in Blackboard course site.
The requirements for this exercise are
1. Identify an article published on or after January 1, 2015, with a subject that is relevant to a topic from the corresponding round’s reading material.
2. A complete citation for the article (source, date, page, etc.),
3. A write up—a maximum of two doubled-spaced pages long (with 1” margins and 12 point font), and error-free.
4. Please submit an electronic copy of both your written report and the article(s) to the appropriate drop box in the “Assignments” area on Blackboard.
The write up Must follow the following outline and include the following three clearly labeled sections (1) Succinctly discuss the major focus of the article (1/4 of the report), (2), A discussion of how the topic relates to strategic management concepts covered in the most recent chapters (either demonstrating support for course concepts or contradicting concepts) (1/2 of the report) (3) What is your reaction to the issue and/or what solutions would you propose? Give your analysis/critique of how you think the organization(s) is handling the situation from a strategic management point of view (1/4 of the report). You MUST Use headings per the outline above. Make sure that the bulk of the review is your analysis, comments, and views about the merits of the issue and not just the mere summary of the article.