Success in management requires both the ability to formulate a winning strategy and the skills to guide employees in executing it. A manager’s brilliant ideas about strategy are ultimately worth little if she or he is unable to translate them into actions that both deliver value to customers and enable the firm to capture a portion of the value created. Yet, managers often overemphasize strategy development while giving short shrift to execution.
In this course, we will examine the powerful and complex role of social organization – the firm’s formal structure, its culture, and the characteristics of the people who work there – in strategy execution. This course provides students with an overarching framework for thinking about the relationship between strategy, the organization and the firm’s environment.
Using this framework, students will identify and characterize the strategies and organizational structures of existing firms, assess alignment between strategy and organizational structure, and identify steps a firm could take to increase the likelihood of executing its strategy successfully. We will consider topics such as innovation, mergers/acquisitions, new ventures, and organizational change.
A large component of the class will involve case discussions, which provide an opportunity for students to gain critical-thinking skills and decision-making experience by putting themselves into the shoes of a specific manager operating at a given firm with a particular, often incomplete, set of information.
