B AD 64185

                                                                    10393 - Acar

                                                          BUSINESS STRATEGY

                                                                  Summer I 2001

                                                   _______________

 

 

INSTRUCTOR    Dr W. Acar, A413 BSA, 672-1156 – Home: 673-6514

              E-mail:  wacar@bsa3.kent.edu

             Office hours: 5:00-6:00 pm & 9:50-10:20 pm M W and by appointment         

 

TEXTS   (Required)        • Lester A. Digman:

                        STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT: Concepts, Processes, Decisions

                        Dame Publications – 5th edit. – 1999  [ISBN 0-87393-792-9]

 

                     • Lester A. Digman:

                        STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT: Cases

                        Dame Publications – 5th edit. – 1999  [ISBN 0-87393-793-7]

 

      (Opt. Reading)     .      Nicholas C. Georgantzas & William Acar:

                        SCENARIO-DRIVEN PLANNING: Learning to Manage Strategic Uncertainty -- Quorum Books (GPG) 1995 

                 

                             .      Richard A. D’Aveni:

                        Hypercompetition – The Free Press, 1994

 

                       .      Henry Mintzberg:

                        The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning – The Free Press, 1994

                       

                       .      William Acar & Brian Wilson:

                        Out of the Segmentation Jungle: reconciling Porter's generic strategies with marketing segmentation.

 

                 

COURSE OBJECTIVES

 

      This "capstone" course pulls together your general knowledge gathered from your readings and living in this society, and the various elements of disciplinary knowledge you have accumulated during your various prior studies.  It is intended to introduce MBA students to the principal concepts of strategic management as well as sensitize them to the overriding issues in this age of increasing globalization.  We will work together so that you will come to see that, since they are the main producers as well as distributors of wealth, it behooves firms to better manage their resources and their future in light of potential environmental change.

 

 

COURSE PREREQUISITES

 

      This course assumes that you are close to completing most of your MBA requirements.  In order not to risk deregistration, in case of doubt please check with the GSM office.

 

COURSE PRINCIPLES

 

      Strategy formulation can be approached in different ways.  This course will stress the theoretical relationship between "strategizing" and analysing the environment.  In a nutshell, a manager has to be able to gauge the threats and opportunities to both his and her past and present strategies.  Considering its skills and the raw materials available, a firm also possesses a combination of strengths and weaknesses.

     

            As many of you already know, basic texts recommend grouping these into a 4-quadrant display called the "SWOT matrix".  An elementary approach to strategy evaluation and design may simply entail devising strategies based on a global and qualitative evaluation of the entries displayed in a SWOT table. This much you've already seen in your introductory courses.  However, the apparent symmetries among them may be misleading since strengths and weaknesses belong to the firm, while threats and opportunities pertain to its environment. Can one do more than learn to avoid threats; could one ever hope to learn to turn them into opportunities? Organizational consultants are now spreading the faddish belief environmental turbulence can best be handled last-minute incrementalism; this course will make you learn to think in terms of strategic possibilities and opportunities.

 

 

 

COURSE PROCEDURE

 

      Meet with your team members outside class hours and bring your ideas to class!  This type of course cannot be ingested passively, but requires your active participation in and before class.  This will render the course more rather than less interesting, since what you get out of a course is in direct relation to the effort that goes into it.  Students will organize themselves into teams of 3-4 people (our version of "quality circles") for class and project preparation, as well as class discussion.  More importantly, the class discussion is an integral part of this course.  Students will be expected to reflect on their readings from the following four sources:

 

      i)    The theories and rationales found in the course material or presented in class.

      ii)   The theoretical knowledge derived from your earlier courses.

      iii)   Information gleaned from reading the business press (e.g., Business Week).

      iv)  General knowledge gleaned from your prior organizational experience.

 

 

 

CLASS ATTENDANCE & PARTICIPATION

 

      An interactive class presupposes beforehand preparation and regular attendance.  A 90% attendance rate will allow you to make allowance for emergencies.  In such eventuality, do not call your instructor; simply ask your quality-circle teammates to take notes for you.

 

 

 

GRADING

 

Individual class participation will be counted toward 20% of the grade, the remaining 80% being divided among seven case write-ups. 

                        The weights of the 7 cases are as follows:

·         Case 1  =  5  pts

·         Case 2  =  7  pts

·         Case 3  =  9   pts

·         Case 4  = 11  pts

·         Case 5  = 13  pts

·         Case 6  = 15  pts

·         Case 7  = 20  pts

 

                *      Team members should complement each other.  It would be wasteful or even infeasible for them to duplicate each other's work.  To provide for greater choice and flexibility, teammates do not all have to end up with the same grade.  Each team member will be evaluated by his or her peers by means of the division of a pie of 10 points (or 1.00 in decimal notation) in among the team members [see attached example].  This will allow the instruction will derive a multiplier to scale the group grade up or down for each individual according to his/her peer review.

 

                *      Alternatively, groups who unanimously make this choice may simply submit together a sheet signed by all members listing EACH person's percentage contribution to the group work.

 

            The final grading will conform to (or possibly be more lenient than) the following numeric scale conversion: A = [90-100], B = [80-89], C = [70-79], D = [60-69], F < 60.

 

 

 

OPTIONAL PRESENTATIONS

 

            To allow the students to participate even in designing the course contents, extra credit can be earned through class presentations approved by the instructor (maximum: 2 presentations per student).

 

            . Individual presentation :            3% extra.

            . Group presentation       :           2% extra for each presenter.

 

 

 

LAST DATE TO WITHDRAW            30 June 2001  [Summer Calendar, p. 1]

 

 

 

NOTE 1          Due to the fact that a number of best-selling books and even movies on business, business takeover/restructuring, entrepreneurial/intrapreneurial and even corporate responsibility issues have been broadly publicized, this session will rely only to a limited degree on video presentations.  In too large numbers, they tend to constrict the time available; since many of you have already been exposed to this information, class time could be better used for reflecting upon and digesting the overload of information to which you are exposed.