My role will be to provide the readings and structure for our learning environment. That means I act as a facilitator that provides assistance when necessary but mostly gets out of your way. Your responsibilities are to read text material, articles, books, newspapers and business magazines that deal with the topics, analyze and synthesize the readings, review and prepare critiques and reviews for presentations and discussions and to work toward developing an understanding of strategic management. Select chapters from this text will be made available as certain concepts are discussed. Therefore, I assume that you enter the course with at least an interest in general management.
All organizations have several aspects in common.
Among these are inter-organizational coalitions, a framework for understanding environmental relations and the politics of resource acquisition and allocation. In order to study how organizations formulate and implement strategy requires concepts and tools from various diverse disciplines. Our understanding of organization processes is based on such disciplines as sociology, psychology and economics. Economic studies of industry dynamics and competitor analysis have contributed to strategic management with their development of their various typologies and generic strategies that explain how organizations align with their environments Theories of individual decision-making have been useful in capturing policies of managers and understanding the way strategic decisions are made within organizations. Related to all the areas above is the role of leadership, particularly the manner in which their executives govern organizations and the boards of directors and the influence of leaders on organizational culture.