Faculty
Professor Ron Sanchez

Course Coordinator
TBA

GLOBE Students ONLY

The course is intended to give students a view of the strategic management process. We emphasize an international and European perspective on strategic management. The course will teach students to recognize strategic management issues and to address them using appropriate diagnostic frameworks.

The content of the course reflects its four learning goals:

Practical Application of Theory
The course demonstrates and exemplifies how strategy theory can be used to analyze macro and micro-economic problems in both theoretical and practical terms.

Relation to a Business or an Institutional Setting
The course includes descriptions and analyses of different types of companies and institutions, industries, and markets. The course makes use of case analyses and exercises.

Relation to International Business or Economics
The international perspective is emphasized to a substantial degree. This is done by analyzing international strategies of companies.

On the examination students should be able to:

Written 4-hour closed book exam, graded by internal and external examiner on the 7-point scale. The make-up and re-examination takes place according to the same rules as the regular examination.

The exam will pose questions about the essential concepts in the course, and include questions about how the concepts covered in the course can be applied to any of the assigned cases.

Exam aids: No aids allowed other than basic language dictionaries (e.g. from mother tongue to English and visa versa and English/English).

Research Based Teaching
The lecturer’s own research is included in curriculum by using the lecturer’s strategic management textbook and selected articles

The content of the course is described in the course schedule below.

In this course we develop a framework for thinking about the management of organizations at the strategic level. We consider the essential long-term concerns of management in directing, building, and supporting organizational competences that enable organizations to perform effectively in their competitive environments. Through this framework, we develop a foundation for integrating the many perspectives -- financial, operational, human resources, technological, and others -- that must be brought together to provide effective strategic management of organizations.

We begin by developing and applying a model of the strategic management process at the individual business unit level that focuses on an organization’s Strategic Logic that defines the organization’s

• Business Concept -- its approach to creating customer value

• Organization Concept -- its plan for organizing value-creating processes

• Core Processes -- its processes for creating product offers, for realizing product offers, and for developing stakeholders who make those processes possible.

We also place the Strategic Logic in a dynamic context by elaborating three frameworks for monitoring and responding to change in the environment of the firm a macro-environmental framework, the industry level framework, and the product life cycle.

We then extend this “business unit” model of strategic management processes to explore the objectives and methods of corporate strategic management (the coordination of multiple business units) and global strategic management (coordination across international boundaries).

Teaching methods:
Lectures, case discussions in class, and student presentations of case assignments.

Required textbook: The New Strategic Management: Organization, Competition, and Competence by Ron Sanchez and Aime Heene, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0 471 34400 1

(Note: Identical paperback edition is also available at lower price).