Course Description
Incorporates all functional business areas dealing with organizational challenges. Emphasizes decision-making processes related to strategy formulation and implementation in global settings.
Course Objectives
After completing this course, students will be able to
- Explain the interaction of the various components of a business
- Integrate the knowledge gained in prior business courses
- Analyze the environment and identify strategic issues and options
- Integrate financial, managerial, accounting, marketing, and human resources decisions into a coherent business strategy
- Explain how to implement strategic plans
- Explain how to evaluate strategic plan outcomes and how to adjust strategies in response to environmental contingencies
Week 1
Lecture: The Strategic Management Process
Lecture: Developing Strategic Vision, Mission, and Objectives
Lecture: Crafting Strategy
Outcomes
- Define strategy
- State the four dependable strategic approaches in gaining a competitive advantage
- Discuss the criteria you need to use to understand a company's strategy
- Explain the benefits of a strategic approach to managing
- Realize the process of developing strategic vision
- Determine how to design company-specific strategic visions
- Identify the elements of strategic vision
- Translate a strategic vision into objectives
- Assess the concept of corporate strategy
- Discuss the concept of business strategy
- Consider the concepts of functional and operating strategies
- Create consistencies among the different levels of strategy and unite them
- Analyze the ethical implications of strategy decisions
- Describe the notion of strategic intent
Week 2
Lecture: Industry Analysis
Lecture: Competitive Analysis
Outcomes
- Identify an industry's dominant economic features
- Analyze the competitive forces in an industry
- Assess how the competitive structure and forces will impact strategic decisions
- List the forces that drive change in an industry
- Ascertain the link between driving forces and strategy
- Develop strategic group maps
- Assess the strength of the strategic position of a company in an industry
- Specify the key factors for competitive success in an industry
Week 3
Lecture: Evaluating Company Resources
Lecture: Evaluating Competitive Capabilities
Outcomes
- Assess how well a firm's current strategy is working
- Identify a firm's resource strengths
- Discuss a firm's resource deficiencies
- Examine a firm's market opportunities
- Explore threats to a firm's future profitability
- Evaluate a company’s resource capabilities and deficiencies with a SWOT analysis
- Assess the costs and prices of a company in terms of their competitiveness
- Discuss the concept of value chain and its role in competition
- Benchmark the costs of key activities
- Use diverse strategic options for achieving cost competitiveness
Week 4
Lecture: The Five Generic Competitive Strategies
Outcomes
- Define the term competitive strategy
- Explain and understand the five generic types of competitive strategies
- Identify the distinctive features of each one of the five competitive strategies
- Evaluate when and how to apply each one of the five competitive strategies
Week 5
Lecture: Vertical Integration Strategies and Competitive Advantage
Lecture: Offensive and Defensive Strategies
Lecture: Strategies in Different Types of Industries
Outcomes
- Realize the concept of vertical integration
- Explore the strategic advantages of vertical integration
- Specify the strategic disadvantages of vertical integration
- Know when and how to use vertical integration strategies
- Define cooperative or collaborative strategies
- Know when and how to use strategic alliances to create competitive advantage
- List and use offensive strategies to secure competitive advantage
- Use offensive strategies to match or exceed competitor strengths
- Employ offensive strategies by capitalizing on competitor weaknesses
- Plan and use defensive strategies to protect competitive advantage
- Recognize first mover advantages and disadvantages
- Plan and use strategies for competing in emerging markets
- Employ and use strategies for competing in high-velocity, turbulent, and fast-changing markets
- List and use strategies for competing in maturing industries
- Recognize and use strategies for competing in stagnant and declining industries
- Explore and use strategies for competing in fragmented industries
Week 6
Lecture: Strategies for International Markets
Lecture: Strategies for Leaders and Runner-Up Firms
Outcomes
- Ascertain why companies are motivated to expand internationally
- List the challenges in operating internationally
- Understand the differences between multicountry and global competition
- Identify the types of international strategies
- Recognize how and when to use the different types of international strategies
- Assess when there is a need for strategic alliances to enhance global competitiveness
- Recognize and apply strategies for industry leaders
- Apply strategies for runner-up firms
- Summarize strategies for weak businesses
- Discuss turnaround strategies for businesses in crisis
Week 7
Lecture: Strategies in Diversified Companies
Lecture: Evaluating Strategies in Diversified Companies
Lecture: Implementing Strategy: Resources and Structure
Outcomes
- List the four elements of the corporate strategy for a diversified company
- Identify when and how to diversify
- Apply the tests for judging a diversification move
- Identify the key diversification strategies
- Describe corporate turnaround, retrenchment, and portfolio restructuring strategies
- Examine multinational diversification strategies
- Identify corporate strategies
- Apply the three tests for evaluating industry attractiveness
- Evaluate the competitive strength of corporate business units
- Conduct a strategic and resource fit analysis
- Define the principles of strategy-implementing tasks
- Apply the principles of building core competencies and competitive capabilities
- Match organization structure to strategy
- Compare the pros and cons of different organizational structures
- Recognize the trends in organizational structures of the future
Week 8
Lecture: Implementing Strategy: Budgets, Policies, Incentives
Lecture: Implementing Strategy: Culture and Leadership
Outcomes
- Evaluate how to reallocate resources to match the budgetary and staffing requirements of a new strategy
- Establish strategy-supporting policies and procedures
- Institute best practices and mechanisms for continuous improvement
- Install support systems to enable personnel to perform their tasks
- Employ motivational practices and incentives to enhance employee commitment to strategy
- Define what corporate culture is
- Realize the role that corporate culture plays in strategy
- Identify the signs of strong and weak cultures
- Create a fit between culture and strategy
- Exert strategic leadership
- Trace where ethical standards come from
- Identify the three categories of management morality
- List the drivers of unethical strategies and behavior
- Discover approaches to managing a company’s ethical conduct
- Evaluate social and corporate responsibility
The course description, objectives and learning outcomes are subject to change without notice based on enhancements made to the course. December 2013