1. Why sustainability has become the core value for Scandic?

2. The objective of reducing CO2 emissions is consistent with the objective of making profits?

3. The interaction between employees and management for crafting the strategy can be a successful approach?

4. How hotels’ autonomy influences strategy execution?

5. How managers are able to monitor the situation and making adjustments?

I would like you to concentrate on the Scandic Hotels case study. Scandic is one of the largest European hotel operators, and its hotels are mainly located in the Northern countries (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland). The headquarter is based in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Nordic roots of the company have always been presented as extremely relevant for its business.

Founded in 1963 by Esso, the American oil company, its original name was “Esso Motor Hotel” and along the years it has been acquired and sold to several companies, such as Hilton and EQT. Starting from the ‘90s, Scandic introduced a novel strategy focused on the concept of sustainability. As highlighted in the 2011 description of its goals, vision, and mission, Scandic aims to “creating value by being the place and inspiration for conscious people in a better world”. This slogan points out the importance of people’s choice about social, economic, and environmentally sustainable practices for creating a better world, and that Scandic is a leader in the industry for its awareness of the topic. Indeed, Scandic is presenting itself as the hotel company which is able to create (economic) value and contributing to social and environmental sustainability, for example by reducing CO2 emissions.

In order to achieve its objectives, Scandic developed an integrated approach to support the share of ideas and collaboration between employees, and therefore crafting a strategy endorsed by the management and able to follow sustainability guidelines. Flexibility and autonomy have been given to single hotels. As an innovative system for supporting the execution and the fine-tuning of its strategy, Scandic introduced, for each hotel, the figure of the environmental networker, i.e. a person in charge of promoting networking and collecting ideas. In this vein, the role of the CEO and the top management has been crucial to sustaining this strategy. The measures adopted for implementing the sustainability-based strategy are constantly evaluated by the managers; moreover, vision, mission, objectives, and execution methods are fine-tuned always according to the three pillars of sustainability: social, economic, and environmental.

By using the Strategy-Making, Strategy-Executing Process illustrated in the book chapter and the video lecture, please describe and comment the different phases followed by Scandic starting from the definition of mission, vision, values and arriving to the monitoring system. Use the following set of questions to address your work: