Course Description:

Why strategic management? Our world is facing several grand challenges - in areas such as learning, health, food, water, energy, environment, security, prosperity, enriching life, governance, resilience, space, sustaining diversity, inclusive equity, and scalable innovations. The solutions to these grand challenges require us to work with limited resources, inadequate capabilities, fragmented knowledge, divergent priorities, and contested perspectives - in other words to be 'strategic'. The course offers a pragmatic approach to guide the formulation and implementation of corporate, business, and functional strategies in organizations seeking to design and execute strategic solutions to various grand challenges. You will advance your skills for situational analysis, problem solving, and decision making in organizational situations. You will learn the modern analytical approaches as well as enduring successful strategic practices. You will be expected to take a conscious technological and global outlook since this orientation in many ways highlights the significant emerging trends in strategic management.

The course is divided into ten class modules, over a five-week period. I invite you to join me in exploring the field and learning about this fascinating, dynamic field.

Course Objectives:

• Gain knowledge of strategy frameworks and vocabulary that enable the identification of critical issues, opportunities, and priorities in real situations

• Refine the ability to analyze alternatives, make decisions, summarize difficult concepts, and communicate ideas that drive future actions

• Bridge the gap between theory and practice by developing an understanding of why, when, and how to apply relevant concepts and techniques

Learning Objectives: At the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Understand competing challenges and identify competing priorities in strategic decision-making, and conduct SWOT, STEEP, and competitor analysis.

• Categorize the different hypotheses on firm-level strategy, and identify conceptual reasons for the entropy in a firm's performance/ competitive advantage.

• Analyze how a firm may transform the structure of value capture and the process of value creation in an industry, and explain when a nation is a productive/ competitive base for firms in a specific industry.

• Demonstrate understanding of how a firm uses any specific business strategy using different parts of the value chain and of the risks entailed, and design a blue ocean strategy for a firm using four actions and value canvas tools.

• Explain market structures in different contexts. Additionally, identify offensive and defensive strategies using case scenarios, and discuss rules of engagement for the firms to prepare for a future scenario.

• Using 9 M analysis, evaluate the nine functional areas in terms of their consistency with cost leadership or differentiation. Further, identify the overall business strategy of a company, and explain how it achieves some differentiation and cost efficiency using different functional strategies. Finally, develop recommendations to help firms adopt technologies that support functional strategies aligned with their business strategy.

• Develop skills to recognize, balance, and prioritize stakeholders, and to manage stakeholder power. Deconstruct the eco-system of a firm, and analyze how values and linkages of various stakeholders shape firm's performance over time.

• Appreciate the motivations, alternatives, and risks associated with growth strategy.

• Explain the motivations of a firm in acquiring another firm, and the risks faced in using acquisition as a mode of growth, as opposed to other modes. Evaluate the strategic, financial and cultural fit of acquisitions.