BUSINESS STRATEGY AND POLICY
Ph.D. Imperial College of Business Studies Lahore
Instructor: Dr. M.I. Ishaq
Class Timings: Sunday 09:00am to 12:00 noon
COURSE GOALS:
To introduce and apply major concepts and frameworks in business strategy.
To improve your ability to work in teams in developing and implementing competitive
strategies.
To improve your ability to recognize and respond to threats and opportunities across
industries, markets and social conditions.
To integrate your knowledge of strategy to understand business relationships in your
interest area.
DESIGN OF THE COURSE:
Business Strategy and Policy is one of the capstone courses in the postgraduate business
curriculum. It focuses on the development and implementation of organizational strategies
across industries, markets and social conditions. The overall aim of this course is to understand
the dynamics of a wide variety of business relationships and to improve your ability to address
strategic problems that you are likely to face as a manager and leader. The course is designed
in three parts. The first part of the course is designed to address competitive strategies within
an industry. The second part of the course is designed to address technology strategy when an
industry is being disrupted. Finally, the third part of the course is designed to integrate strategic
frameworks to address business relationships across industries and social conditions. In this
last part students will apply the knowledge developed throughout the course towards
understanding strategic relationships in their industry of their choice.
The course is a capstone course and is quite intense in terms of personal commitment and
workload. However, the intensity and nature of the workload is designed to change as the
course proceeds. In particular, the highly structured portion of the class is front-loaded and is
team-based. The reason for this is to make students fluent in basic strategy concepts early
while finding support from other students. As the course moves past this first phase, the
course will be more fluid and is designed to allow students to explore and develop strategic
thinking within the context of their own industry interests.
DESIGN OF CLASSES
The classes are designed to compliment a variety of learning styles through readings, cases,
exercises and student participation. While the course is divided into three main themes, each
week typically has a topic with two readings and a case.
In the first part of the course, the readings and cases are heavily dominated by issues in
competitive strategy. As the course moves into issues of technology strategy, strategic
relationships and market strategies, there will be more emphasis on the frameworks and
discussion of the cases. Participation and personal contributions are important and welcome;
they add substantially to variety in each class and help you sharpen your own voice on strategy
and organization.
Class 1: Welcome and Introduction
Class 2: What is strategy?
Mintzberg, H., Lampel, J. and Ahlstrand, B. 1998. Chapters 1 and 12. Strategy Safari: A
Guided Tour Through the Wilds of Strategic Management: 1-21, 349-373. New York: The
Free Press.
Porter, ME. 1996. What is Strategy? Harvard Business Review, 74 (6): 61-78.
PART 1: COMPETITIVE STRATEGY
Mankins, MC. and Steele, R. 2005. Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance.
Harvard Business Review.
Hambrick, D. C. & Fredrickson, J. W. 2001. Are you sure you have a strategy? Academy
of Management Executive, 15 (4): 48-59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4165785
CASE: Hansen, MT. and Darwall, C. 2003. Intuit Inc: Transforming and Entrepreneurial
Company into a Collaborative Organization (A).
External Environment
Porter, ME. 1980. Chapter 1: The Structural Analysis of Industries. Competitive Strategy:
Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors: 3-33. New York: Free Press.
Watkins, MD. 2003. Government Games. Sloan Management Review. 44 (2):91-95.
http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/hww/Journals/getIssues.jhtml?sid=HWW%3AOMNIFT
&issn=1532-9194
CASE: Roberts, D. and Fry, JN. 2002. Vincor International Inc.
DUE: CAPSIM Strategic Plan January 19th; Capsim Round 1 and 2
Internal Capabilities
Barney, J. B. 1995. Looking inside for competitive advantage. Academy of Management
Executive, 9 (4): 49-61. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4165288
Ghemawat, PJ. and Rivkin, JW. 2006. Creating Competitive Advantage. Harvard Business
School Case.
CASE: Ghemawat, PJ., Mark, KA. and Bradley, SP. Wal-Mart Stores in 2003.
Business Level Strategies
Goold, M. and Campbell, A. 1998. Desperately Seeking Synergy. Harvard Business Review,
76 (5): 131-143.
Randall, T., Terwiesch, C. and Ulrich, KT. 2004 Principles for user design of customized
products. California Management Review. 47 (4) 68-85.
http://www.library.ualberta.ca/ejournals/search/index.cfm
CASE: Reinhard, F., Casadesus- Masanell, R. and Freier, D. 2004. Patagonia.
PART 2: TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY
Technology Strategy
Christensen, CM. and Raynor, ME. 2003. Chapter 2. The Innovators Solution: Creating
and Sustaining Successful Growth. 31-71. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press.
Kim, WC. and Mauborgne, R. 2007. Chapter 1. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create
Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant. 3-22. Boston: Harvard
Business School Press.
Strategic Relationships High Coordination
Roberts, EB., and Berry, CA. 1985. Entering New Businesses: Selecting Strategies for
Success. Sloan Management Review, 26 (3): 3-17.1998.
Roberts, EB. and Liu, WK. 2001. Ally or Acquire? How Technology Leaders Decide. Sloan
Management Review, 43(1): 26-34.
CASE: Montgomery, CA. 2003. Newell Company: Corporate Strategy.
Strategic Relationships Low Coordination
Dyer, JH., Kale, P. and Singh, H. 2001. How to Make Strategic Alliances Work. Sloan
Management Review, 42 (4): 37-43.
Kale, P. & Singh, H. 2009. Managing strategic alliances: What do we know now, and where
do we go from here? Academy of Management Perspectives, 23 (3): 45-62.
http://journals.aomonline.org/inpress/main.asp?action=preview&art_id=647&p_id=3&p_
short=AMP
CASE: Casciaro, T. and Darwall, C. 2003. The HP-Cisco Alliance (A).
PART 3: STRATEGY FRONTIERS
Network Strategy
Anderson, C. 2004. The Long Tail. Wired Magazine, October.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
Ransdell, E. 1999. Network Effects. Fast Company, 27.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/27/neteffects.html?page=0%2C1
CASE: Suarez, FF., Edelman, B. and Srinivasan, A. 2009. Symbian, Google and Apple in
the Mobile Space (A).
International Strategy
Gupta, A. K. & Govindarajan, V. 2001. Converting global presence into global competitive
advantage. Academy of Management Executive, 15 (2): 45-56.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/4165734
Yu, L. 2008 Competing against Low-Cost Countries. Sloan Management Review, 42 (2): 9.
CASE: Jones, GG., Kanno, A. and Egawa, M. 2008. Making China Beautiful: Shiseido and
China.
Strategy and Social Responsibility
Porter, ME. and Kramer, MR. 2006 Strategy and Society: The Link Between Competitive
Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility.
Wheeler, D., Fabig, H., & Boele, R. 2002. Paradoxes and dilemmas for stakeholder
responsive firms in the extractive sector: Lessons from the case of Shell and the Ogoni. Journal
of Business Ethics, 39 (3): 297-318.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/6ctjp90abq53ce5w/
CASE: Wicks, A., Mead, J. and Freeman, E. 2007. ExxonMobil and the Chad/Cameroon
Pipeline.
FINAL STRATEGY PROJECT
Taleb, NN. 2007. Prologue. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. xvii-
xxviii.
Kroll, M. J., Toombs, L. A., & Wright, P. 2000. Napoleon's tragic march home from
Moscow: Lessons in hubris. Academy of Management Executive, 14 (1): 117-128.
