Advance Program in Strategic Management

Apply the strategy making process by setting goals, analyzing external opportunities and threats and internal strengths and weaknesses, and executing and monitoring the strategic plan.

Craft the organization's mission statement, defining its business, purpose, vision, values, and major goals to guide strategy and decisions in response to change.

Set goals that are precise, measurable, limited, challenging but realistic, and time-bound; they guide strategic management process—vision, mission, swot analysis, formulation, implementation, and performance evaluation—to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.

Explore SWOT analysis and the business model, including functional level strategies, global strategies, and corporate level strategies, to assess strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and guide strategic planning.

Identify and implement congruent strategies to achieve competitive advantage by translating strategic plans into action through organizational design, culture, and control systems.

Implement strategy by turning a chosen plan into action across functional, business, and corporate levels, shaping organization structure, culture, and control systems to achieve goals.

Explore how formal strategic planning supports better decisions, combining planned and emergent strategies, scenario forecasting, and collaborative execution across management levels to set goals, define objectives, and monitor progress.

Strategic decision making uses information and awareness of cognitive biases to gain competitive advantage. Follow a rational, stage-based process—define objectives, gather data, evaluate alternatives, involve stakeholders, implement, and learn.

Strategic leadership guides top executives in setting long-term direction with vision and informed decision making, empowering subordinates. It blends transactional, transformational, visionary, and collaborative styles to sustain high performance.

Explore external analysis to identify opportunities and threats within the macro environment, using SWOT analysis to assess the organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, including industry-specific dynamics in airline sector.

Explore how changing industry boundaries emerge as customer needs evolve and technologies blur telecom and computer lines, driving digital workflows and new business models while reducing burnout.

The risk of entry by potential competitors arises when barriers to entry are low, enabling new entrants that threaten market share and profitability, a dynamic analyzed by Porter's five forces.

Explore rivalry among established companies and how the intensity of competition among existing firms shapes profits through price competition, advertising, and product innovations, as framed by Porter's five forces.

Explore the threat of substitute products in Porter’s model, and how price changes drive consumer substitution toward alternative goods to preserve profitability.

Discover how strategic groups identify opportunities and threats, reveal direct substitute competition within groups, and map competitor positions to guide strategic moves and assess strengths and weaknesses.

Explore the industry life cycle analysis, including launch, growth, shake-out, maturity, and decline, and learn how expansion, peak, contraction, and the economic cycle shape competitive forces and stock analysis.

Explore life cycle issues in the industrial life cycle, including embryonic, growth, and maturity stages, and how life cycle assessment evaluates environmental impacts from raw materials to disposal.

Examine how industry structure explains only a fraction of profit variance and how company differences, through differentiation, distribution channels, branding, and ownership forms like private versus public, drive performance.

Explore macroeconomic forces such as economic growth, interest rates, currency exchange rates, and inflation, and how these factors influence national income, unemployment, GDP, and business performance.

Identify how global forces—economic growth in emerging markets, reduced trade barriers, and cross-border networks—shape policies, competition, and business strategies through political, economic, social movements, demographic, and technological factors.

Explore how technological forces drive industry structure, lower entry barriers, and alter competition, production methods, and market reach through relentless tech progress.

Demographic forces arise from changes in population characteristics like age distribution, fertility, mortality, and migration, shaping opportunities and threats for managers and guiding market segmentation.

Explore how internal analysis of resources, capabilities, and distinctive competencies shapes competitive advantage and profitability, using Starbucks and Howard Schultz as a case study.

Identify how firms gain a sustained competitive advantage in strategic management by leveraging knowledge, absorptive capacity, and intangible assets such as patents, brand names, routines, and networks to boost profitability.

Identify distinctive competencies as the basis for competitive advantage, enabling differentiation or lower costs, with Starbucks and Toyota as examples, and learn to identify them through brainstorming and mission alignment.

Explore how the value chain, business model, and generic distinctive competencies drive competitive advantage, using Walmart's cost leadership and process innovations to create value from farm to customer.

Discover how the durability of competitive advantage, driven by sustainable differentiation through branding, service, technology, design, and distribution, enables firms to earn above-average returns.

Advance program in strategic management explores achieving superior efficiency through economies of scale, division of labor, flexible manufacturing, just-in-time systems, and customer-driven productivity.

Develop a human resource strategy that drives efficiency and profitability by boosting employee productivity, aligning with business objectives, and guiding recruitment, training, compensation, and succession planning.

Zynga pursues a differentiation strategy in online social gaming, aiming for a competitive edge through unique, premium offerings, cross-promotion, and targeted resource allocation.

Explore business level strategy and industry environment via Groupon's path to online coupon leadership, illustrating differentiation, resource allocation, merchant partnerships, and Porter's five forces analysis.

Explore strategies in fragmented industries where many small firms compete by focusing on customer groups and local regions, using divide and conquer and geographic consolidation to capture opportunities.

Explore chaining as a strategic network of linked outlets and examine horizontal mergers, like Macy's and Kroger, for economies of scale, national markets, and cost leadership or differentiation.

Explore crossing the chasm by aligning innovations with early adopters and the early majority through targeted niches, distribution channels, and mass market strategies.

Analyze how market growth rates influence strategic choices from market penetration and diversification to product development, and how higher growth can boost profitability and bargaining power with suppliers and channels.

Navigate the life cycle to maturity by analyzing investment strategy, resource allocation across the value chain, and market share and product life cycle stages to sustain growth and manage saturation.

Advance program in strategic management highlights embryonic strategies that build a distinctive competency to gain a competitive advantage, attract customers, and grow market share in early industries.

Explore growth strategies to strengthen a business model, expand in expanding markets, and balance market penetration, diversification, and product development through strategic partnerships and acquisitions.

Explore maturity strategies within the product life cycle, focusing on differentiating offerings, pricing, brand, and innovation to defend market share as growth slows and saturation occurs.

Explore strategies for declining industries, including harvesting and divestiture, to minimize spending, pursue a calculated exit plan, and reallocate resources to sustain profitability.

Explore the rise of cloud computing as a paradigm shift, where firms migrate from on premise hardware to cloud data centers, enabling ERP, automation, cost reduction, and strategic technology.

Pioneers a new standard by rapidly building the installed base, leveraging network effects and switching costs to become the de facto format, while pursuing complements, killer apps, and strategic licensing.

Explore how ensuring a supply of complements drives demand by jointly producing complementary goods, incentivizing others to produce them, and boosting willingness to pay for paired products.

Explore how killer applications leverage new technology to drive adoption, jump start demand, and establish competitive advantage through essential software platforms and operating systems.

Explore how operating systems boot, manage hardware and memory, and provide a user interface and software platform across Windows, Mac OS, Linux, iOS, and Android.

High technology industries incur high fixed development costs but low marginal costs for additional units, especially software; automation and cloud computing further reduce costs and boost efficiency.

Explore the strategic significance of business decisions, from cost structures and profitability to intellectual property challenges in digital distribution, and examine how strategic management guides objectives and actions.

Capture first mover advantages by being first to market, setting standards, gaining market share, and building brand recognition and loyalty, while leveraging the learning curve, technological leadership, and asset pre-emption.

Identify the first mover disadvantages in strategic management, including high development costs, educating customers, pioneering technology, and distribution setup, while later entrants can free ride and copy.

Explore how lowering trade barriers and investment restrictions drive the globalization of production and markets, enabling dispersed production, larger global markets, economies of scale, and diversified risk.

Global expansion boosts profitability by enlarging markets, lowering costs through economies of scale, and enabling differentiation and supply-chain optimization for sustainable revenue growth.

Explore how to choose a global strategy that balances local responsiveness with economies of scale, location economies, and customization for regional markets.

Strategic alliances offer benefits but may create trade secret risks, unequal gains, and new competitors, while facing communication, culture, language, and management challenges.

Analyze how horizontal integration, vertical integration, and strategic outsourcing drive corporate level strategy amid the rapid consolidation of the US airline industry.

Explore corporate level strategy with related and unrelated diversification, illustrated by VF Corp's Timberland acquisition to gain related diversification benefits and expand its product range across global markets.

Explore related diversification as a corporate level strategy that moves into a new, related industry by leveraging common value chain functions, core competencies, and linkages for competitive advantage.

Explore unrelated diversification, where firms add unrelated products or services with no strategic fit or value-chain link to diversify risk and seek financial stability.

Explore the limits and disadvantages of diversification, including increased costs, lack of focus on core business, cannibalization, and higher portfolio risk from excessive or unrelated diversification.

Identify profitable opportunities to diversify into new industries and enter new markets, then implement strategies to make diversification profitable while reducing risk and sustaining growth.

Choose a strategy by evaluating related and unrelated diversification, weighing coordination and bureaucratic costs. Apply planning techniques to select and implement the best strategy to achieve organizational objectives.

Analyze the entire business to determine a corporate level strategy that guides long-term growth or value, balancing related or unrelated diversification within a multi-business model.

Explore internal new ventures as a method for entering new industries, including how corporate level strategies, venture units, acquisitions, and joint ventures foster entrepreneurship, risk, and growth within a company.

Adopt a structured R and D approach for internal new venturing, guided by exploratory research, to turn new technologies into commercial applications through strategic planning, execution, and ongoing innovation.