Analysis of ACS Cobham International School's Organization and It's Essay

Analysis of ACS Cobham International School's Organization and It's Strategic Plan - Essay Example The essay is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the organization’s key targets, objectives and products .Section 3 discusses the competitive environment of the organization .Section 4 discusses the overall environment of the organization including both external and internal environments .Section 5 concludes the essay and makes recommendations for improvement of the strategic plan of the organization. 2. Targets, Objectives and Services ACS Cobham International School, London is part of the ACS International School group which consists of four schools, three of which are in England and the other in Doha. The school offers education from early childhood children to high school International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma, and an American curriculum, including Advanced Placement (AP) courses (ACS, 2011a). According to Collins and Porras (1996), the mission statement of a company gives its important ideology and visionary components. The three major components of the mission st atement are generally identified as the committed core values, core purpose and the visionary goals to be followed by the firm to fulfil its mission. The goal of the school â€Å"is to encourage critical thinkers, responsible global citizens, and students who are prepared to achieve the highest standards, both in their subsequent education and throughout their careers† (ACS, 2011b).This goal is expected to achieve through excellent quality of teaching, student centered approach, high quality curriculum, creative thinking and independent learning development, multi cultured atmosphere, educating high values and morals and participative approach(ACS, 2011c). 3. Competitive Analysis According to Coulter (2005), there are both specific environment, like customers, competitors, suppliers etc which influence directly the company’s strategic decision and general environment like political, economic, social and technological sectors that indirectly affect the company’s strategic decisions. The specific environment factors affecting a company’s strategic decisions are analyzed based on the model of the five competitive forces by Porter (1980). Porter’s model is based on the insight that a corporate strategy should meet the opportunities and threats in the organization’s external environment. This model includes the analysis of determinants of the intensity of competition and profitability of the industry like bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power of suppliers, threat of entry of new competitors, threat of substitutes and competitive rivalry (Pavlicek, 2008). However, the main criticisms against the Porter’s models are their focus on only profitability and survival and the assumptions of classic perfect market, simple and static market structures and competitive markets which disable to capture the dynamics of markets .Hence, it cannot consider new business cycle models (Speed, 1989 and Sharp, 1996). In spite of th ese criticisms, this model is still popular for external analysis. The results of Porter’s five forces for ACS are given below. 1. Threat of New Entry Entry barriers are low in the education sector in UK .There are a large number of schools in UK with different arrangements,