Instruction
Company is Nordstrom.
Overview: The executive memorandum assignment requires your careful consideration of an appropriate, sensible investment project for your chosen company.
Furthermore, this assignment will develop and demonstrate your ability to find useful, authoritative information sources about your selected company, its
industry, its economic environment, and the particular investment opportunity.
Prompt: Write a memo about the expansion opportunity for which you will request funding in your final project proposal. This paper should be 1–2 pages long
and should include only a simple narrative description. You do not need fancy formatting, numbers, tables, or graphs in this document.
List your key information sources about the organization you have chosen for your final project, explaining in one to two sentences each how source is relevant to
your project. Your memo should identify the source (not just a website address) plus, in general, describe what information that source can reliably provide. Your
sources must be authoritative. The company’s own website is an authoritative source for its own public financial and other information, for example.
Serious business or economic sites, such as Bloomberg, or industry trade journals can be authoritative sources for fairly unbiased news about the organization or
its industry. Other reliable sources could educate you about the business environment in your project’s target country (e. g., the CIA World Factbook). Someone
you know who has worked for that organization or in that industry could also be an excellent source of certain information.
Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed:
Include a narrative overview of your expansion opportunity. Describe the expansion project, the country in which the expansion will take place, and the
reasoning behind this expansion into this country at this particular time. In other words, why does this particular project and country make sense for your
chosen company?
Include key information sources related to the company you have chosen. Sources should provide an introductory, authoritative, future-oriented
understanding of the company itself, the industry, technology, customers, suppliers and competitors, and the economic environment of the company and
of your proposed expansion. Sources could be published or online; they could even include a person you know with experience in that industry. The
sources will almost certainly include the company’s website; you might also follow its Facebook and Twitter feeds.
Note how each source is relevant and describe what information the source will provide. You will probably develop more sources later in the course, but
these are meant to give you a solid start.
Guidelines for Submission: Your executive memo must be 1–2 pages long (excluding the reference page), doubled spaced, written in 12-point Times New Roman
font. Your reference page should be in APA style.