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and Research curriculum and learning contents subscriptions
are available to International Business Schools, Universities,
Management Development and Training Centres and their
Students and Staff throughout the world.
An
essential course in any graduate business curriculum is the
so-called "capstone" course. It culminates the program
and prepares you for a responsible administrative position
by dealing with organizations from a top-management point-of-view.
This is that course: It teaches you to formulate and implement
a unified, com-prehensive, and integrated set of decisions
that attains organization purpose.
Strategic Management analyzes,
develops, and changes the organization's structures and processes
to make (or keep) it effective and efficient under constantly
changing circumstances. The strategic management process demands
mastering a body of analytical tools, using sound judgment,
and taking a systems perspective. It also studies the decisions
and leadership required of general managers when formulating
corporate strategy and organizing the firm's resources to
accomplish its goals and objectives.
Objectives
This
course attempts to train you to assess, develop, and administer
an organization's strategy. We expect you will leave the course
able to analyze business problems and synthesize action plans.
This course should therefore help you to:
accept
your responsibilities as an organization member and leader,
able to develop and share an organiza-tional vision, and
deal with a multitude of stakeholders;
appreciate
the dynamics of industry competition;
understand
the resources, capabilities, and core competences that make
a company successful in earning and sustaining above-average
returns;
identify
the incentives and resources that promote or constrain diversification,
acquisition, and strategic alliances;
become
aware of the difficulties of designing and implementing
strategic change, particularly when integrating strategy
with information technology, human resources, marketing,
and finance;
broaden
your perspective, lengthen your horizon, and have greater
self-insight into your management assumptions and personal
principles;
sharpen
your skills in presenting analyses and plans of action,
both orally and in writing; and
realize that good decisions are typically a synthesis of
the ideas of several people.
From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection:
In 1991, Jay Barney developed the Resource Based View of the firm.
This view established four criteria that determine a firm's competitive
capabilities in the marketplace.
These four criteria for judging a firm's resources are:
Are they Valuable? (do they enable a firm to devise strategies
that improve efficiency or effectiveness?)
Are they Rare? (if many other firms possess it, then it is
not rare)
Are they Imperfectly Imitable? (because of unique historical
conditions, causally ambiguous, and/or are socially complex)
Are they Non-Substitutable? (if a ready substitute can be found,
then this condition is not met)
When
all four of these criteria are met, then a firm can be said
to have a sustainable competitive advantage. In
other words, the firm will have an advantage in the marketplace
which will last until the criteria are no longer met completely.
As a result, the firm will be able to earn higher profits than
other firms with which it competes.
The dynamic model of strategy is a way of understanding how strategic actions occur. It recognizes that strategic planning is dynamic, that is, strategy involves a complex pattern of actions and reactions. It is partially planned and partially unplanned.
