Description

Multinational Management – Week 6 Project Instructions

Multinational Company Project

Once you have selected a world region, you must pick ONE of the following topics for your project:

1.    Develop a comprehensive global human resource (HR) strategy for your company. Investigate what the firm is essentially doing and/or focus on what it should be doing. Your responsibility is to identify and then summarize major global challenges the multinational company is experiencing. Develop a matrix to show how the company can create a sustainable competitive advantage and highlight any key HR implications. Your strategy must specifically outline whether policies, programs and initiatives are to be global or domestic (centralized or decentralized) and explain the rationale for these decisions. In addition, you should explore and recapitulate how the HR function should be structured and managed to successfully implement this strategy.

2.    Develop a comprehensive operations management strategy for your company. Investigate where the firm is manufacturing its products and locate manufacturing facilities, identify the country it is operating in, technology factors, cost efficiency, how the company is making global sourcing decisions, discuss logistics and supply chain management of the company, and the transfer of knowledge from home country to the host country. Your strategy must specifically outline whether policies, programs and initiatives are to be global or domestic and explain the rationale for these decisions. In addition, you should explore and recapitulate how the operations management function should be structured and managed to successfully implement this strategy.

3.    Develop a comprehensive marketing strategy for your multinational company. For this strategy, you will need to discuss product attributes, cultural attributes, economic and technological attributes, analyze the distribution strategy, how the company is choosing between distributors in the country it is operating, pricing strategy that your company has adopted, communication strategy and the barriers in international advertising, and last but not least, how the company is using the marketing mix in international arena. Your strategy must specifically outline whether policies, programs and initiatives are to be global or domestic and explain the rationale for these decisions. In addition, you should explore and recapitulate how the marketing strategy function should be structured and managed to successfully implement this strategy.

Include in your project:

Assess and describe the multinational firm’s vision, strategy, competitive advantage, organizational structure, locations, and culture. Then describe the firm’s home country business environment based on the 12 pillars (The Global Competitive index) and the home country culture based on Hofstede’s cultural value model of business behavior, communication style (low and high context), languages spoken, religious beliefs and social norms.

You will submit this project into a discussion forum for peer critique in week six.

In week seven, after reviewing the critique, incorporate any relevant changes. You will then resubmit your work - this time as an assignment - in week eight.

Peer Critique Guidelines

1.      As a peer reviewer, your job is to help the author of the paper to improve the quality of work.

2.      First and foremost, you need to take the peer review opportunity very seriously.

3.      By doing a peer review and receiving feedback from other peer reviewers, you will become a better writer, reader, and critical thinker.

4.      Students who excel in peer reviews tend to do better academically and are more successful in earning their college degree.

5.      It is important to understand the assignment requirements in order to keep the author on track.

Please consider the following guidelines when doing a peer review: 

If you are not familiar with the topic, make sure to read the paper before making any suggestions.

·         Be constructive when giving someone a feedback on their work.

·         Constructive feedback does not mean that you have to be entirely negative or positive of their work.

·         Conduct the peer review as you would want others to review your own work.

·         If you do not understand the topic, read it once or twice before doing a critique.

·         If, after reading the paper several times, you still don’t understand, then you need to say so.

·         Identify the areas that you don’t understand and why you don’t understand them.

·         Identify the strengths and weaknesses of the paper. What do you think is the most important thing that the author said in the paper? 

·         Identify the paragraphs that are easiest to read, and tell why. Identify the paragraphs that were most difficult to read, and tell why.

·         Were you confused when reading the paper, or did the paper explain the topic clearly?

·         Provide any final thoughts on the overall work, and the improvements needed.