Strategic Planning – Five Forces, SWOT, PESTLE

1) identifying all the pertinent issues that management needs to address, (2) perform whatever analysis and evaluation (e.g., Five Forces, SWOT, PESTLE, financial ratios, etc.) as appropriate, and (3) propose an action plan and set of recommendations addressing the issues you have identified.

Specifically, address what grade would you give Southwest management for the job it has done in crafting the company’s strategy? Why? What is it that you like or dislike about the strategy? Why? Does Southwest have a winning strategy? Why or why not?

Assignment #2

Does the AirTran acquisition make good strategic sense for Southwest? What strategic issues and problems do Gary Kelly and Southwest executives need to address as they proceed to close the deal with AirTran and contemplate how best to integrate AirTran’s operations and AirTran’s employees into Southwest? What weaknesses or problems do you see at Southwest Airlines?

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.