Wharton: Business Strategy from Wharton: Competitive Advantage

• Evaluate your strategic environment in the present and the future
• Identify the differences between organizational effectiveness and strategic positioning
• Map core and supporting activities of your firm and how they interact with each other
• Locate organizational barriers to strategy implementation and organizational change
• Engage in a strategic planning process that works

Module 1: Analyze your firm’s internal fit

• What is strategy?
• The difference between organizational effectiveness and strategy
• The importance of tradeoffs
• The value chain
• Interactions among strategic choices
• Mapping your firm’s activity system

Module 2: Analyze your firm’s external fit

• The concept of “value”
• Industry analysis
• Willingness-to-pay and cost drivers for different customer segments
• Your value proposition
• Strategic Positioning

Module 3: Maintaining your firm’s dynamic fit

• The origins of your firm’s strategy
• Drivers of strategy evolution
• Barriers to organizational change (perception, knowledge, motivation, and coordination challenges)
• Disruptive technological changes

Module 4: Creating new strategies and initiatives

• Creating new strategic possibilities
• Identifying conditions for success for each possibility
• Designing empirical tests
• Selecting strategic possibilities
• Important shifts in mindsets