Course in Managing Strategically: Issues and Concerns

It's a war out there. A successful manager must out-think her counterpart.This makes the understanding of the underlying motivations and driving attitudes indispensable. The rules of the game are changing every moment of the day. Age old organisational set-ups are making way for the smarter and leaner structures.The smart manager thus can either be a structural designer or a "virtual" outcast.

The pervasive concept in this course is that of competitive dynamics. The dynamics arise out of the firm's competitive advantage. Competitive advantage is defined as:

"any feature of a business firm that enables it to earn a high rate of return on investments despite counter pressure from competitors. Business strategy should be formulated and implemented with an eye towards developing such features since they will ultimately determine a business's competitive advantage".

As this course develops, it will be increasingly apparent that those individual charged with managing an organization's strategy must deal with the change in the market place and the behaviour of the firm's rivals in achieving and sustaining the advantage. To come to this understanding the class will devote the first few weeks in going over the basic tenets of strategy making processes from the perspective of resource-based model. And then the class will spend the rest of the semester on the following topical areas:

Strategic alliances within the context of diversification
Role of top and middle managers
Turnaround strategies
The pedagogical structure of this course is to cover conceptual material and case study in our sessions in order to reap a two-way flow of learning from theory to application, and vice-versa. Each student must be an active participant and make meaningful comments on the assigned readings and cases. The vast majority of managerial interactions with others are verbal. For this reason, the development of verbal skills is given high priority in this course.