Graduation with Leadership Distinction:
Professional and Civic Engagement
Insight 1
Key insight 1: Define your strategy and adjust accordingly.
It is through failure that companies and individuals find success because they are able to acknowledge their mistakes, assess their options, and decide on a more strategic approach going forward. There is never going to be a strategy that goes accordingly as planned; it is okay to readjust.
My MGMT 478 course, Strategic Management, pushed me to identify business-level and corporate-level strategies employed by organizations to create value and achieve competitive advantage. I was required to participate in a semester-long simulation where my team and I had to craft a business strategy for our product introductions, reason about strategic options, read and comprehend industry financial reports, evaluate action alternatives, and make sound strategic decisions relating to R&D, marketing, and finance, all while competing against 10 other teams for the best product on the market.
After much deliberation, my team and I chose to follow a niche differentiation strategy, which meant that our products would gain a competitive advantage by distinguishing themselves with excellent design, high awareness, easy accessibility, and the introduction of new products into the High, Performance, and Size segments within the simulation. We planned to develop an R&D competency that would keep pace with the market as well as gradually increasing MTBF. While we had initially decided to focus on our area of expertise when making strategic decisions, it quickly became a collaborative effort, giving us a chance to gain insight and knowledge in areas of business where we weren’t as familiar.
Starting with round one, we were successful with the niche differentiation strategy that we chose to implement; however, we spiraled in rounds two and three when we received emergency loans due to poor forecasting and began focusing solely on recovering from the loans. We became complacent with our decisions and stocked out in almost all of our products and also failed to automate products in the lower-end segments.
It was because of this course that I learned the importance of adjusting a strategy. This class gave me the opportunity to experience real-life business situations in a simulation without the consequences of failing in a real-life scenario. Because our team was so focused on adhering to the written outline of the strategy, we failed to assess the ever-changing market and adjust accordingly. This was a detrimental mistake which hindered our overall success in the simulation competition, but a valuable lesson learned and one that is applicable in the real-world.
My beyond the classroom experience, an internship at Wells Fargo, provided me the opportunity to identify, develop, and present an untapped strategic opportunity that the company should take advantage of. A group of five interns, all with strong personalities and a competitive edge, proved to make collaboration difficult when trying to decide whose point we should further develop into our final pitch. We eventually decided that a financial literacy program was an area of opportunity that we could capitalize on. We then created our strategic plan for researching the numbers and data needed to strengthen our proposal and divided up the work based on our knowledge and expertise.
In week six of our ten-week internship, we found ourselves burned out and frustrated with the idea that we had settled on. Despite our presentation being scheduled for week nine, I proposed that we reassess what we had chosen and to find another angle to approach the untapped opportunity. After some initial pushback, I was able to convince our team that there was another aspect of our strategic opportunity that we had failed to consider, which had been brought to light during my own research. Of the staggering facts that I found, the one that stood out to me the most was that two thirds of American Adults cannot pass a basic financial literacy test. I suggested that instead of educating adults, that we focused our energy on educating young adults instead, catching them early and giving them a strong financial foundation for the rest of their lives. We restructured our idea and developed “FLIP,” a Financial Literacy Interactive Program that aimed to target Wells Fargo’s young adult segment and strengthen their relationship and brand image with college students through an interactive, online simulation.
The powerpoint slides above, my beyond the classroom artifact, depicts my contribution to the team: The Marketing Plan. As a marketing major and a Wholesale Content Marketing and Strategy intern, it was my responsibility to develop a marketing strategy that would attract college students. Prior to restructuring our plan, I had planned to focus our marketing efforts on targeted ads; however, after we readjusted our target market and pitch, I organized phone calls and meetings with varying Wells Fargo employees that represented internal programs like the Campus Card Program and the Director of the Student Segment. I refocused our attention to leveraging internal and existing Wells Fargo resources to minimize our marketing budget. The Wells Fargo footprint spreads across the United States and they have a presence on university campuses across the country. Because of this, I proposed that we take advantage of existing landing pages, local branches, and campus career centers to promote FLIP. In addition to this, I suggested using social media platforms and promoted ads to bring awareness of our financial literacy program since our target market use social media more than any of the other customer segments.
It was because of this project that I was able to experience the reality that business plans can fail to come to fruition as they’re supposed to. The purpose of a strategy isn’t to follow it to a tee, but to help exploit core competencies. As our strategy and pitch developed, we were exposed to other ideas and developments that had more substance and gave us a stronger foundation for a proposal. It was through both of these experiences that I realized your strategy is just a framework for success. While a strategic approach needs to be systematic rather than sporadic, it also needs to allow for some ambiguity. Market forces, combined with other internal and external factors, can cause disruptions that need to be addressed and reassessed. In addition to having a well-defined strategy, one should also have a proactive road map for transformation, allowing for changes to be made as necessary.
This excel sheet, my within the classroom artifact, depicts our Budget vs. Actual calculations from the third round of the simulation. After every round, we compared numbers to see from a financial standpoint how our group was doing. The numbers in red are losses, which account for a majority of the document. Even after assessing the damage done, for the remainder of the simulation rounds, we struggled to produce products that were competitive and failed to position them correctly. Despite the lack of success with our chosen strategy, our team was nervous about changing to a different strategy mid-way through the simulation rounds, and suffered because of our inability to accept ambiguity and adjust.
