Strategic Management

• Coursera:
  Corporate Strategy & Business Strategy
• Illinois Catalog BADM 544: Strategic Management
• Offered in Summer Term (May-Aug)

This course is part of the Strategic Leadership and Management Specialization.

Course Description

In the first part of this course (Business Strategy), you will learn how businesses create, capture, and maintain value, which is fundamental for their sustainable competitive advantage. This course enables budding managers to better understand value creation and capture in business, and provides tools to analyze critical business issues from a variety of perspectives. In the second part of this strategic management course (Corporate Strategy), you will learn how an organization creates, captures, and sustains value through the configuration and coordination of its multimarket activities.

Emphasis is given to developing pragmatic and action-oriented general management skills. Importantly, theory within the disciplines of accounting, economics, finance, international business, marketing, political science, and organization theory have important implications for general management. Cases are used to offer simulated real-world experience and practice for integrating course material.

Instructor

Course Goals and Objectives

• Develop understanding on how firms create, capture, and sustain competitive advantage.
• Appropriately apply important strategic management tools and frameworks to real business contexts.
• RAnalyze strategic business situations and formulate coherent and actionable strategies.
• Develop skills to evaluate the fit between corporate strategy and organization structure to improve economic performance.
• Implement strategy and organize a firm for strategic success; and
• Think like a CEO / Entrepreneur / General Manager about business-level and corporate-level issues.

Topics of this course

• Module 1: Business Strategy: Leading Strategically
• Module 2: External Analysis
• Module 3: Internal Analysis and Competitive Advantage
• Module 4: Strategic Positioning and Strategic Renewal

Course Materials

Readings are assigned in each module.
Required:

• Harvard Cases: Both Business Strategy and Corporate Strategy modules use full-length case studies to illustrate the application of important strategic management concepts and frameworks. All case studies are required reading. Cases can be purchased from Harvard Business Publishing through this course pack [course pack updated at 1 PM Central Time, May 30, 2017](Firefox browser suggested). If you have difficulties accessing the course pack, please contact Harvard. Each case is about $4.25. There are 6 cases in total.

Reference Textbook:

• Rothaermel, F. T. (2012). Strategic Management: Concepts. New York: McGraw-Hill. (First edition) [It is also fine to use the 2nd or 3rd edition.]
  Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, and 12 are reference readings (not required, but helpful for getting a deeper understanding or clarifying concepts).

Live Session Schedule (Tentative)

May 31st, 2017 – July 25th, 2017

Course Elements

IN COURSERA

• Lecture Videos.
• Readings.
• Case Study Activities.
• Quizzes.
• Peer Assessed Writing Assignment.
• Forum Discussions.

IN COMPASS 2G

• Group Assignments and Presentations.
• Additional Content: Videos and Readings.
• Live Case Study Activities.
• Additional Module Quizzes.
• Live Sessions.
• Forum Discussions.