The Strategist

Catalog description

Business success requires being different. To succeed, a business needs to stand out from the competition. This is what business strategy courses teach, and they are right. But finding a way to be different is harder than just knowing that it is important to be different. This is the fundamental challenge facing the business strategist. It is the challenge of looking at an existing organization and coming up with ways to make its position in the marketplace more distinctive. Or, it is the challenge of looking at the potential of a new business and creating a distinct position for it. The strategist is equally important in the worlds of existing enterprise and of entrepreneurship. The challenge of being different is considerable. Much of the time, everyone has access to more or less the same knowledge base. This is likely even more the case today, in a globally interconnected world, relative to the past. In this environment, the key to being different becomes one’s ability to think differently. Of course, one has to think both differently and better, and come up with not just a different but a superior business proposition. Out-thinking others in this way is the job of the business strategist. In this course, we will develop a four-way framework to help us think differently and better and become better business strategists. The four components of the framework (4 C’s) are: Strategy from Contrast Strategy from Combination Strategy from Constraint Strategy from Context We will examine many examples of great business strategies of each of these four types, and we will also use this framework to help us generate entirely new strategies.