Assignment #1 (Due noontime, Wednesday, Sept. 10)

Over the course of the semester, you will be doing an ongoing "case study" of a Fortune 500 company. There will be periodic online assignments in which you will analyze the company according to theories and models that we have recenty covered in class. For this first phase of the analysis you should:

• Choose a Fortune 500 company.
• Find the company's mission statement and analyze the mission statement. Click here to see what a mission statement should accomplish
• Analyze the company's financial statements for the most recent 5 years (generally employing skills you learned in your FIN and ACCT classes).

The reason you should select a Fortune 500 company is because you can then expect that you will be able to find a great deal of publicly-available information about the company. Additionally, you should choose a company that you find personally interesting. Please do spend some time browsing the list of Fortune 500 companies to find a company that you find interesting; that way, you will learn more.

Please email your work to me by noontime, Wednesday, September 10. This phase of the assignment should not be long; as a guideline I will suggest perhaps a page of text analyzing the mission, a page of text summaruzing your conclusions from the financial analysis, and some exhibits showing your financial analysis.

This assignment is part of the online portion of this course; we will not meet in the classroom today (Sept. 4) and you can use that time to conduct your analysis. I will be available at 626-689-2504 during regularly scheduled office hours today.

Subsequent assignments will build on this first phase.