Strategic Management

Resource Person Mr. Khurram Aziz Fani

Program MCom

Prerequisite for the course

Credit Hours 3

Semester Fall 2010

Class Timings Saturday

Office

Counseling Hours

Telephone # 0321-5487726

E-mail khurramaziz786@gmail.com

BRIEF COURSE DESCRIPTION

This interdisciplinary capstone course emphasizes the analysis of complex business problems in
domestic and global settings. Success in strategy depends on matching an organization’s distinctive
assets and capabilities to its external relationships. This course will help you to develop a better
understanding of what business strategy entails, both theoretically and in practice. It will improve your
strategic thinking skills and develop your own view of your role in making strategy in the organization.
Using a strategic management framework, this course integrates core business knowledge across all
functional and decision-support areas to arrive at economically sound, ethically principled, value-adding
solutions. The course combines lecture, discussion, case analysis, and simulation as principal methods
for learning how to effectively manage the business enterprise in competitive environments.
It will contribute to your practical development as a manager by providing insights into the theory and
practice of managing the process of strategic decision-making and strategy implementation in
organizations. Strategies can affect whether an organization survives, prospers or dies. Survival and
prosperity depend on the solutions to questions such as: which products or services to offer; whether to
pursue single or multiple lines of business; which markets or clients to aim for; whether to limit activities to
local markets or expand internationally; how to acquire appropriate technologies, knowledge, finance and
human resources; and which skills and capabilities to develop that will be relevant to your competitive
strengths now and in the future.

The course helps you to understand the structure of the industries and markets and the general
government and business context that your organization operates in. I will teach you how to analyze
relationships with suppliers, customers, competitors and collaborators. You will be helped to identify and
evaluate your organization’s resources and capabilities, including financial resources, human resources,
physical resources (such as control over buildings, equipment or transportation networks) and intangible
resources (such as brands, knowledge or informal networks with collaborative partners).

I emphasize the importance of developing potential sources of strategic advantage over competitors (both
existing and future) and explain how successful organizations manage this process. You are shown how
to identify sources of potential advantage within your own organization’s resources and capabilities and
what might make those resources and capabilities distinctive and long-lasting. In many industries,
effective strategies are based not on competition but on collaboration. Indeed, often organizations may be
your competitors in some circumstances and your strategic partner in others. Managers therefore
increasingly need to understand how to make such alliances work well over time.

The course approaches strategy as a process, stressing that the assumptions upon which strategies are
based must be continuously rethought and revised as industry conditions change. There are no
permanently safe and long-lasting strategies. Managers also need to understand how strategies are
affected by organizational politics and organizational culture and why strategies may go wrong over time.
Often, the most difficult task is that of strategy implementation. That is the stage at which even the best
planned strategies can fail, since it is dependent on the ability to manage change within your organization

COURSE OBJECTIVES

This course is intended to be a challenging and exciting capstone course for the graduate business
school curriculum. It is first and foremost a course about "strategy" and the creation of "economic value."
The course centres around the theme that a company achieves sustained success if and only if its
managers (1) develop, and revise as needed, an action-oriented strategic plan, and (2) implement and
execute the plan with some proficiency. We shall stress how and why a well-formulated, well-executed
strategy nearly always produces above-average business performance. 

This course is multidisciplinary and highly integrative. After the somewhat more definitive subjects you
have been studying in previous semesters, you will probably have to make large adjustments in both how
you approach this course and how you approach and absorb its concepts. Indeed, this course not only
serves the function of trying to integrate much of the knowledge gained in other business courses, but it is
also a "big picture" course, a trait that makes it a truly different kind of course from other business
administration courses. Virtually all of the other required and elective courses you have taken were
concerned with a specific functional area (e.g., production, marketing, finance, accounting, human
resources), and/or well-defined and specialized body of knowledge (e.g., economics, statistics, business
law, information systems). In contrast, the problems and issues of strategy formulation and strategy
implementation cover the whole spectrum of business and management. Many variables and situational
factors must be dealt with simultaneously. Weighing the pros and cons of strategy entails a total
enterprise perspective and a talent for judging how all of the relevant factors add up. 

Strategic management not only integrates most of the business disciplines covered in previous courses,
but it is an emerging field of study in its own right. As I see it, the central task of this course is to drive
home what the strategic and administrative roles and tasks of management are, to introduce you to what
strategy means, to lead you through the ins and outs of formulating and implementing a strategic plan, to
get you into the habit of automatically reviewing a firm's situation and reappraising the need for strategy
revision, and to explore the "hows" and "whys" of the analytical techniques which have recently come to
the forefront. The overriding pedagogical objective is to sharpen your abilities to "think strategically" and
to diagnose situations from a strategic perspective. 

Accomplishing this objective entails introducing you to how an enterprise must in fact deal with all of the
complexities and constraints of the environments in which it operates, why these cannot be assumed
away or ignored, and how they affect strategic decisions. It means giving you exposure to and some
experience in trying to grapple with the many frustrating administrative dilemmas of managing the total
enterprise. It means drilling you thoroughly in the tools of strategy analysis and exercising you in the
managerial task of sizing up a company's strategic position. It means teaching you how to use your
knowledge of the various functional disciplines as tools for analysis and evaluation, and to do so in ways
which meet the needs of strategic management. It means systematically exposing you to the rigors of
industry and competitive analysis, to the process of formulating an attractive strategic plan, and to the
varied administrative tasks associated with implementing and executing the chosen strategy as well as
circumstances permit. It means helping you learn to assess strategic pluses and minuses and develop a
stronger sense of business judgment. It means giving you some practice in putting all the pieces of the
business puzzle together and in looking at things from an overall company point of view. In charting a
firm's course for long-term success, you will find that there are no obviously correct answers—only
difficult choices. 

Accordingly, I have established the following objectives of student achievement in this course:

1. To be able to integrate the knowledge gained in earlier courses and to apply the concepts and
tools learned in previous semesters, as well as in this one, in identifying an organization's
strengths and weaknesses and in diagnosing the real threats and opportunities facing an
organization in an increasingly turbulent environment.
2. To learn how to manage strategically as opposed to functionally or operationally.
3. To build your skills in conducting a strategic analysis; to be able to formulate and critically
evaluate a strategic plan for an organization; and to recommend and implement a viable course
of action given its circumstances.
4. To appreciate the difficulties and realities of formal strategic planning and implementation in
larger, diversified, or multinational corporations.
5. To demonstrate an ability to cope with and use incomplete, partial, or conflicting information;
recognize and assess contradictory data; identify unreliable data; separate symptoms and causes
from problems and issues; make realistic assumptions and collect relevant diagnostic information;
and develop complicated reasoning chains supported by assumptions and evidence.
6. To develop your capacity to identify strategic issues, to sort out irrelevant issues while focusing
only on the most relevant ones, to reason carefully about strategic options, and to adequately
assess the likely consequences of alternative actions.
7. To improve your ability to present and defend recommendations, to use your intuition to reach
defensible assessments and interpretations, or argue persuasively for a point of view, recognizing
that no set of strategies is necessarily "correct."
8. To better prepare you for a successful career as a business professional.
LEARNING OUTCOMES

At the end of this course, students would be expected to understand the role of the strategists within an
organisation. They will have a basic understanding of what strategic management is, how internal and
external environment analysis is conducted, how strategies are formulated and implemented. In addition
they will have a discussion on contemporary issues of strategic management.

Expected cognitive outcomes include the development and demonstration of a high level of skills in:
 written communication
 problem solving
 analysis and critical evaluation
 information literacy
 ability to assume responsibility and make decisions.

CONTENTS

Week TOPIC CHAPTER

1 Introduction To the Subject and Course Policies

Strategic position
1. The need for, and purpose of, strategic and
business analysis
2. Environmental issues affecting the strategic
position of an organisation
1,2,3 3. Competitive forces affecting an organisation Ch.1
4. Marketing and the value of goods and services
5. The internal resources, capabilities and
competences of an organisation
6. The expectations of stakeholders and the
influence of ethics and culture

Strategic choices
1. The influence of corporate strategy on an
organisation
4 Ch. 2
2. Alternative approaches to achieving
competitive advantage
3. Alternative directions and methods of
development

Strategic action
5,6 1. Organising and enabling success Ch.3
2. Managing strategic change
3. Understanding strategy development
7 Ch. 4
Business process change
 1. The role of process and process change
initiatives
2. Improving the processes of the organisation
3. Software solutions

Information technology
1. Principles of e-business
2. E-business application: upstream supply chain
8 management Ch.5
3. E-business application: downstream supply
chain management
4. E-business application: customer relationship
management

Quality issues
1. Quality control, quality assurance, and quality
9 management systems Ch. 6
2. Quality in the information systems
development lifecycle
3. Quality initiatives: Six-Sigma

Project management
10 1. Identifying and initiating projects Ch.7
2. Managing and leading projects
3. Monitoring, controlling and concluding projects

Financial Analysis
1. The link between strategy and finance
2. Finance decisions to formulate and support
11 Ch.8
business strategy
3. Financial implications of making strategic
choices and of implementing strategic
actions

People
1. Strategy and people: leadership
12,13
2. Strategy and people: performance management Ch.9
14,15
3. Strategy and people: reward management
4. Strategy and people: job design
5. Strategy and people: staff development

TEXTS AND SUPPORTING MATERIALS

Prescribed Text:
Strategic Management: Concepts and Cases, 9/e by Fred R. David (Prentice Hall, 2003)
Business Strategy Professional Business Publications
Reference Texts:
Strategic Management and Business Policy, 9/e by Thomas L. Wheelen & J. David Hunger   (Prentice
Hall, 2003)
In addition to these, the lecturer will distribute readings and other material as and when required.
Internet Resources:
1. See digital library EbscoHost and SpringerLink

ASSESSMENT

Sr. # ASSESEMENT TOOLS WEIGHT

1. Quizzes 10 %

2. Assignments 10 %

3. Mid Term 20 %

4. Class Participation 10 %

5. Project 15%

6. Final Exam 35%

TOTAL 100 %

Students must complete each component of the assessment to the satisfaction of the course instructor,
and achieve an overall mark of at least 50% in order to pass the course. All components of the above
assessment are compulsory, and must be completed in order to obtain a pass grade. Students are
expected to perform satisfactorily in each item.