Description
Task: Assessment is by one assignment, a critical essay of 6000 words (100%) which integrates theory and practice. The assignment must include a clear structure with an abstract, a list of references and, where appropriate, appendices and diagrams. You must make appropriate use of journal articles and texts. References should follow the Harvard system – see YSJ Harvard at https://www.yorksj.ac.uk/library/refe… The assignment should contain: 1. A critical literature review of key theories of how strategy is developed and implemented, and the relationship between strategy, innovation and change 2. A critical analysis of selected strategic processes within your organisation, or an organisation of your choice, related to relevant theories 3. An assessment of the extent to which people within the organisation are engaged with and contribute to a selected strategy 4. Recommendations about how strategic processes within the organisation could be improved. To preserve confidentiality, please anonymise the organisation or organisations you discuss in the assignment, eg by calling them Company X, or Governmental Organisation Y, or International Organisation Z. Similarly, where you write about private individuals, call them manager A, or leader B. N.B. The word count will include quotations but exclude footnotes, list of references, appendices, tables and graphs. Exhibits will not count against the word limit but should not contain large amounts of text. (It will be expected that they will normally containdiagrams or tables or visual images). Appendices should not contain material that is essential to meeting the assignment brief. If you exceed the wordcount by more than 10%, you will be penalised. This task has a weight of 100% and the deadline to complete is 09 Aug 2020.
Michelle Theodore grade report (#259188)
Successful Strategic Thinking – Final paper
Your Assignment
Your paper was satisfactorily presented, with a cover page numbered pages, and would have
been improved with a table of contents. There was an abstract, but at two pages it was
much too long; please remember for future assignments that the abstract is a single
non-indented paragraph (about one third of a page) describing the purpose and contents of
your paper – you should typically present here the motivation, results, and conclusions, and for
this paper, it would be a way of pointing out that you have addressed all the assignment
requirements. The lack of a table of contents was not only an inconvenience, but also
resulted in confusion. Your section headings did not indicate any clear structure to
discriminate between sections and sub-sections, so headings such as Theories (in bold), was
followed by Knowledge-Intensive Theory (not bold), then Price Discrimination Theory (bold),
Problem (bold), and so on.
The list of references was extensive, included some contemporary content, and in general
followed the Harvard referencing system (authors should be listed by family name and initials,
not given names). You need to support statements such as “Reports show that it is more
than 20% of the workforce that works in the service sector” with citations to such reports.
You in-text citations also generally followed Harvard.
You write well, but I found the introduction very confusing. It had no clear theme and jumped
from entrepreneurship to the external environment, the service sector, strategic management,
then back to the service sector. Since the requirement for the first part of the assessment
is a literature review of key theories of how strategy is developed and implemented, and the
relationship between strategy, innovation and change, my confusion continued when your next
section stated that the intention was “to conclusively determine the relationship between
strategic management practices and the company’s performance”. Indeed there was very little
in the section on Theories that related to the assessment in a meaningful manner, or indeed
in the entire submission. I would have expected the “literature review of key theories of how
strategy is developed and implemented, and the relationship between strategy, innovation and
change” to have consisted of a logical structure such as: definition of strategy, how
strategies are developed, what tools can be used to develop a strategy, how they are
implemented, how organisations ensure strategies are maintained, how is change enveloped,
how is innovation accomplished, etc. (it should be your choice, not mine). The writing should
have encompassed a series of sections with these headings with your content following them
closely.
Your organisation analysis also did not follow the needs of the assessment, and in future I
strongly recommend that you use the three assessment questions as section headings for your
organisation analysis – that will give you a logical structure and help you to be sure that
nothing is omitted. Note that we are not interested in the strategy itself for this analysis,
but rather the process. Describe the process in more detail – who is involved, how long the
process takes, what actually happens, what tools are used in the strategy development, how it
