Faculty
Professor Peter Karnøe, IOA; Associate Professor Stig Hartmann, PEØ; Professor Jens Frøslev Christensen, IVS

Course Coordinator
Professor Peter Karnøe, IOA

Co-requisite: CM-OS41 must be taken together with this course, as the exams are combined.

Overlap with Organisational Identity
This Business Strategy course overlaps naturally with OI in three ways:

The aim of this course is to introduce the students to a set of innovative management practices for business development and strategic management. The course provides students with an overview of different perspectives in the field of strategy, but it, simultaneously, makes a distinct move from the traditional linear causality models of strategic management to more complex models that focus on strategy as a process - facilitating analysis of ‘how’ organisational strategies emerge. The notion of emergence emphasises the processes whereby issues and activities become strategic and how strategic decisions shape actions in the organisation in relation to perceived environmental changes.

Specifically, the course presents three schools of strategic management and business development and it discusses their underlying assumptions about which actions, methods and tools provide the ‘best practice’ for business.

Each theory is viewed as a ‘tool’, which students can use to study strategic management in practice as well as to practice management.

Design and Planning School

This school presents the orthodox language of strategy with analysis, objective setting, rational choice, planning and control systems, all activated and directed from top management in a coherent and logical fashion.

Cultural-Institutional School

This school emphasises that strategic thinking and decision-making is not context free, but that it is based on the basic assumptions, beliefs and mental models, and ’how we do things around here’.

Complex Responsive Process School

This is a radical behavioural approach in the sense that it preserves the context sensitivity from the cultural school, but it also points attention to politics, tensions, paradox and local action. Emphasis will be on understanding organisations as complex responsive processes, i.e. as ongoing processes of action and communication. From this perspective, strategy is the evolving pattern of collective and individual identities emerging from people’s interactions. Fabricating and organising strategies in relation to environmental changes takes place in local interactive settings. This perspective suggests new roles and boundaries for participation in strategy making, and it proposes new analytical tools for managing conditions of uncertainty and unpredictability.

While the more conventional theories of strategic management maintain the methodological position that managers are able to stand ‘objectively apart’ from the organisation and devise ways of controlling it, the theory of complex responsive processes see managers/leaders as ‘participant inquirers’ that are part of the processes, through which strategies are fabricated and gain effect.

The course moves away from taking strategies and intentions as given and views them as emerging in the context of people's trying to organise things. Therefore, we will look at how each of these three theoretical schools view such things as intentions, control, profits and budgets, mission-vision-strategy, set direction and creativity that are supposed to guide the practice of managerial action. Particularly, the course will address this in a context of a managerial attention to the balance between exploitation and exploration of resources, competences, mental models and meaning/identity that shape business development.

Finally, the course focuses on the role of tools and models in analysis and on how numbers are used in decision-making. Tools and models have a different status at the three schools. From the rational perspective, where tools are seen as neutral descriptors and objective decision points, we move towards a constructivist position, where they are seen as performing realities – fabricating ‘facts’- that serve as input for managerial discussion and sense making.

The overall ambition of this course is to stimulate students to learn about and make use of innovative management practices for business development and strategic management. This is crucial for the ability to understand and practice strategic management and business development.

Information will be provided on e-campus by 1 September.

Information will be provided on e-campus by 1 September.

The total reading is about 800 pages.

In terms of level of difficulty, 400 pages are considered relatively easy reading, but the 400 pages are on a higher and more difficult level.