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Rationale

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Strategic Management Inputs
Planned versus emergent views of strategy
Business and Corporate Level Strategy
Strategic Actions: Strategy Formulation
Global Business Environment
Strategic options in international business
Strategic Actions: Strategy Implementation

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Marketing Process Assignment

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Strategic Thinking

Rationale

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:

1. 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;

2. appreciate the dynamics of industry competition;

3. understand the resources, capabilities, and core competences that make a company successful in earning and sustaining above-average returns;

4. identify the incentives and resources that promote or constrain diversification, acquisition, and strategic alliances;

5. become aware of the difficulties of designing and implementing strategic change, particularly when integrating strategy with information technology, human resources, marketing, and finance;

6. broaden your perspective, lengthen your horizon, and have greater self-insight into your management assumptions and personal principles;

7. 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.

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Strategic Management Inputs

Sustainable Competitive Advantage

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.

Tutorials

Readings

Introduction to Strategy and Strategic Management (ppt)
Strategy – a manager’s point of view (ppt)
Aspects of Strategy (ppt)
Context (ppt)
- Diversity of Context

Planned versus emergent views of strategy

Tutorials

Readings

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.