Chapter 01

Access or download the Annual Report of any of any of the four organizations that we use as running cases - or any other major PLC, or publicly-owned corporation, that you know. Read the chairman’s and managing director’s report - almost all Annual Reports will have these near the beginning. From these and any other information that you might find (for example Carrefour’s 2006 report has a section entitled ‘Strategy’; John Lewis’ has a section called ‘Business Review’), identify any issues that are relevant to the development of strategy in the organization.

Remember that our definition of strategy is:
the set of actions through which an organization, by accident or design, develops resources and uses them to deliver services or products in a way which its users find valuable, while meeting the financial and other objectives and constraints imposed by key stakeholders, and which is likely to lead to some property that is unique, or at least distinctive, and the means for renewing its competitive advantage as the environment changes.

So you should look for things like the directors’ strategic intentions, environmental factors affecting the organization, key stakeholders and their requirements, how knowledge is used within the firm, and whether there is any evidence of learning or bounded rationality.

Some annual reports you may want to look at:

Sony Corporation: http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/ar/2007/index.html

McDonald’s: http://www.mcdonalds.com/corp/invest/pub/2007_Proxy.html

H&M: http://www.hm.com/us/investorrelations/financialreports/annualreports__investorannualreports.nhtml

BA: http://www.bashares.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=69499&p=irol-reportsannual

Gap Inc: http://www.gapinc.com/public/Investors/investors.shtml

Carrefour: http://www.carrefour.com/cdc/finance/publications-and-presentations/annual-reports

Samsung: http://www.samsung.com/us/aboutsamsung/ir/financialinformation/annualreport/IR_Annual2006.html

John Lewis Partnership: http://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/Display.aspx?&MasterId=82d1cf50-e09b-4544-ba51-eae62bb8289a&NavigationId=863

Bertelsmann: http://www.bertelsmann.com/bertelsmann_corp/wms41/bm/index.php?ci=569&language=2

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Oxford University Press, Online Resource Centre, Chapter 01.

Chapter 01