Strategic Leadership

Catalog description

This course introduces the key concepts, tools, and principles of strategy formulation and competitive analysis. It is concerned with managerial decisions and actions that affect the performance and survival of organizations. The course is focused on the information, analyses, organizational processes, and skills and judgment managers must use to devise strategies, position their organizations, define firm boundaries and maximize long-term success in the face of uncertainty and competition. Strategic Management is an integrative and interdisciplinary course. It assumes a broad view of the external environment that includes customers/clients, competitors, technology, the market, government, and global forces and views the external environment as dynamic and characterized by uncertainty. The course draws together and builds on all the ideas, concepts, and theories from prior foundational courses in management. The course takes a general management perspective, viewing the organization as a whole, and examining how policies in each functional area are integrated into an overall competitive strategy. The key strategic decisions of concern in this course involve selecting competitive strategies, creating and defending competitive advantages, defining organizational boundaries and allocating critical resources over long periods. Decisions such as these can only be made effectively by viewing an organization holistically, and over the long term.