Writing assignment

Select a multinational company from one of the following world regions:

1.  European Union and England

2.  North America

3.  Central/South America

4.  Asia

5.  Australia

6.  Sub-Saharan Africa

7.  Middle East/North Africa

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.