CEMS Glob­al Stra­tegic Man­age­ment

Course content

Around the world and also within the CEMS institutions, most courses on global strategy and strategic management adopt a rational, analytical perspective. Students learn theories that explain why some firms are better than others, why they differ, and what strategic actions can be used in which kind of situations. The underlying idea is that the combination of sufficient and relevant information as well as the appropriate analytical tools and processes enable us to optimize strategic decision-making. This is a classical, important, and foundational approach to strategic management. 

However, an increasingly influential stream of research uses insights from the behavioral sciences to understand and improve the strategic management of global organizations. This research has shown that important strategic mistakes are driven by logical fallacies and cognitive biases, by imperfect assumptions on the relational nature of business, by the inability to properly identify and tackle problems, particularly when they unfold on processes that are global in nature, and finally by a limited ability to navigate complex and fast-changing business scenarios. All of this, despite proper analytical tools and the availability of relevant information. 

This course takes a pragmatic approach, and focuses on the way strategy is crafted and carried out in practice.Particularly, the course starts by establishing a shared understanding of classical perspectives in global strategy and international business, and then advances this understanding by developing your capabilities in five core approaches to strategy thinking that will provide you with novel intuitions as well as powerful tools for the strategic management of global organizations—that is, a behavioral-based, relational-based, problem-based, growth-based, and scenario-based approach to strategy analysis, formulation, and execution. 

This course will provide you with practical skills, as well as theoretical frameworks and tools that are of utmost importance for being an effective global manager, and especially relevant for functions such as corporate development, strategy, and consulting.