Strategic Management

What you'll learn

• Define strategy as an integrated set of choices, distinguish it from goals, budgets and operational effectiveness, and test strategy statements with Rumelt's kernel of diagnosis, guiding policy and coherent actions.
• Define an industry, analyze its structure with the five forces, measure concentration with CR4 and the Herfindahl–Hirschman index, and explain how complements and government shape industry profitability.
• Analyze competitive interaction with game theory, solve sequential games by backward induction, assess credible threats, commitment and first-mover advantages, and recommend strategies across the industry life cycle.
• Assess resources and capabilities with value chain analysis and the VRIO framework, explain what makes advantages hard to imitate, and evaluate dynamic capabilities and core rigidities.
• Calculate economic value created and its division between customers and the firm, apply the experience curve, and evaluate cost leadership, differentiation, focus and integrated strategies and the activity systems that sustain them.
• Evaluate innovation strategy using S-curves, disruptive innovation, network effects, platform economics and the profiting-from-innovation framework, and assess the strategic implications of artificial intelligence.
• Apply transaction cost economics to make-or-buy and vertical integration decisions, evaluate diversification with Porter's three tests, and judge corporate portfolios by parenting advantage.
• Evaluate acquisitions by comparing synergies with premiums and integration costs, choose integration approaches and alliance structures, and anticipate review under the 2023 Merger Guidelines, Hart–Scott–Rodino and CFIUS.
• Analyze international expansion with the CAGE framework and the integration–responsiveness grid, choose entry modes, and assess the strategic effects of USMCA's annual reviews and tariffs on American firms.
• Align structure, processes, rewards, people and culture with strategy using the star and 7-S models, allocate resources strategically, and plan for leading strategic change.
• Measure value creation with ROIC and economic profit, build balanced scorecards, strategy maps and OKRs, design indicators that resist gaming, and apply premise, implementation and interactive controls.
• Conduct a complete strategic analysis, evaluate options under uncertainty with scenarios and simulation, and present a recommendation with an implementation plan, scorecard and risk responses.