Strategy is one of the most dangerous concepts in business: managers agree that it is of vital importance for business success, but often confuse a definition of strategy with other business concepts, such as business models, mission and vision statements, strategic plans, or following best practices in the industry. For example, you may hear managers claim that ‘our strategy is to double the number of customers that we serve’ or read reports which claim that Google’s strategy is to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. But the truth is: both claims are false!
 
This course covers the fundamentals of business strategy, a firm’s deliberate set of integrated choices that uniquely positions the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable competitive advantage and superior value relative to the competition. While the course acknowledges the importance of specific business contexts, it will provide you with an in-depth understanding of strategy as a process that you will find helpful in any type of firm or work organization in the future. This process combines a firm’s business purpose and goals with a careful analysis of external and internal environments to drive strategy creation, and sheds light on implementation tactics and performance evaluation.
 
In contrast to typical strategic management courses, you will not only learn a general approach to structure your thinking about business strategy in the abstract, but also how to apply this approach to actual business problems in specific contexts.
 
By the end of the course, you will have acquired a certain savvy about developing and evaluating business strategy. This does not mean having memorized an arsenal of ‘rules‘.
 
By training your senses how firms can win the competition, the course aims to provide you with a competitive advantage: the ability to predict competitor and customer response to business activities, and hence to create value for all(!) stakeholders by making more insightful strategy decisions in many different industries.

To attend the course / exercise, registration via e-learning platform OLAT is required. Registration is possible from September 6 to October 1, 2021. The students themselves are responsible for checking the creditability of the course to their course of study.

Direct link to OLAT course:

https://lms.uzh.ch/url/RepositoryEntry/17049190560