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Strategic Management, 458-001, Fall 2024

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This capstone course is designed to help develop your critical thinking skills and prepare you to be vital contributors to, and effective managers of, a business enterprise. There is a heavy use of business frameworks in this class, plus various methods of simulating a management environment are employed, including Harvard Business School case studies and a consulting project to help a real-world organization.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

At the conclusion of this capstone course, students will be able to:

· Analyze a firm’s strategy.

· Explain how various components of a firm work together to achieve the organization’s goals.

· Integrate and apply knowledge and skills learned in more specialized courses.

· Explore, identify, and evaluate strategic options and select an appropriate strategy, using business frameworks.

· Clearly communicate your strategic analysis and recommendations.

· Analyze a real-world organization and develop a strategic plan to assist that firm with an improved strategy, using course concepts, and independent research.

HOW IS THIS CLASS TAUGHT?

The course is taught using the Socratic Method – i.e., group discussion. The professor – who has 40+ years in the work world and has been a CEO twice – does not lecture but, instead, attempts to mimic how interactions occur in the workplace by inciting class conversations, led by you, the students.  As such, there will be constant cold calls because, yes, that’s what happens in the “real world.” As a result, you must come prepared every class and be ready to share your knowledge and insights with classmates. There are readings nearly every week from both the textbook and Harvard Business School cases, quite a few oral presentations – both team and individual – and there should be time in some classes to work on your consulting project.  Finally, guest speakers will be sprinkled throughout the semester, primarily to help bring the consulting project to life, giving different perspectives on it.  Through these various methods – and a lot of effort on your part – the professor hopes that this class will provide you with the tools to be an effective manager and leader!

Each Class Session Typically Includes At Least Five Activities:

1. Weekly quiz on anything done in/out of class from that week

2. Presentations of recent business news (“News Talks”) plus a “Leadership Talk”

3. Group discussion reviewing the day’s assigned reading and/or assignments

4. In-class group exercises and presentations, as part of the case study discussion

5. Time for group to work on the consulting project.

TEXTBOOKS AND OTHER MATERIALS

· Required Textbook: Frank Rothaermel, Strategic Management: Concepts, 6^th Edition, McGraw-Hill Irwin. ISBN 978-1-264-12431-2. Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education, 2024. You can rent this book or purchase it. https://www.mheducation.com/highered/product/strategic-management-rothaermel/M9781264124312.html.

· Required Purchase of Case Studies: Case pack from Harvard Business School Publishing.  Buy them here: https://hbsp.harvard.edu/import/1205035

· News Sources: Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The New York Times, and other well-researched, sources of business and world news.  Please do not use Business Insider, TMZ, Forbes, Inc., or other not so rigorous business sources.  Note that you can get a free WSJ online subscription as a student and many premium readings can be had, for free, through the AU library system.

GRADING, GENERAL

The more effort you put into the course work the higher your final grade probably will be.  Of course, the quality of your work is also factored in, but usually with effort comes high quality work and, most importantly: showing that you understand the course concepts and can integrate them into your writing and class conversation. The professor grades on a curve so, in the end, your absolute number grade may be rounded up, not down, ultimately giving about 50% of the class A’s or A minuses.

If you do the work, do the work well, speak in class regularly, don’t use AI to help you write your papers, and are good teammate on the consulting team project, then things will work out just fine for you, grade-wise.

Team projects can be rough, I realize.  Know that the majority of your grade will be based on individual, not team, assignments.  Whenever possible, the professor will post every student’s assignment grade and feedback on Canvas, but other times (like with team, consulting project) he will mark-up the assignment and return it only to the team member who submitted it. It’s that’s student’s responsibility to then distribute that grade and feedback to the rest of the team. The professor reserves the right to increase/decrease your grade based on the Peer Evaluation (see below under Miscellaneous), which gives detail on your group dynamics and is a required submission from all students.

GRADING, WEIGHTS

The weights for each of the general assignment categories are shown here:

The following cut-off points will be used to determine your grades: