The Portable MBA in Strategy

Strategic management is a quickly evolving body of knowledge and techniques that leading companies use to make winning decisions in today's rapidly changing marketplace. To create strategies that will put your organization ahead of its competition you have to learn to make better choices:

• How best to attract and retain the most valuable customers
• How best to win today while positioning for success in tomorrow's marketplace

To demonstrate the strategic management practices that winners use, The Portable MBA in Strategy brings together a unique group of world-class authorities.

They show you how your organization can put put into action the strategies adopted by some of the world's most innovative companies:

• How to anticipate and steer change in your competitive environment
• How to develop and evaluate strategy alternatives
• How to build an adaptable organization that can execute innovative strategies

The lessons offered in each chapter will show any manager — in both profit-making and not-for-profit institutions — how to make a more valuable contribution to his or her organization. The Portable MBA in Strategy will enable readers to keep up with the latest strategic innovations and find out what makes some companies dynamic competitors and others merely also-rans.

You couldn't learn strategy from a more qualified staff of teachers and consultants. Liam Fahey and Robert M. Randall have assembled a team of internationally-known experts from two continents, including representatives from such top business schools as Dartmouth, Harvard, Northwestern, the University of Michigan, and Wharton in the U.S. and the Cranfield School of Management in Europe. Several chapters are the products of teams of distinguished consultants who shows you their latest techniques for large and small organizations.

From these renowned advisors to many of the world's most successful companies — leading thinkers such as Richard Pascale, Michael Porter, C. K. Prahalad, and James Brian Quinn — you learn how the best companies are practicing corporate strategy, business unit strategy, industry analysis, development of capabilities and competencies, strategy implementation, and organizational learning.

Like every book in the The Portable MBA Series, The Portable MBA in Strategy provides managers and entrepreneurs with the most recent developments and tredns in business thinking and practice in an easy-to-digest form. This book provides you with an integrated and coherent framework to develop and execute strategy. Each chapter is enlivened with the latest insightful examples and revealing case studies; from them you'll learn the strategic issues behind recent business news headlines. There are practical guidelines and analysis frameworks in each chapter that every manager — from CEO to line supervisor — can adapt for use in his or her own business plans.

• Part One: An Introduction to Strategic Management
1. Strategic Management: Today's Most Important Business Challenge
• Part Two: Strategy: Winning in the Marketplace
2. Corporate Strategy: Managing a Set of Businesses
3. Business Strategy: Managing the Single Business
4. Global Strategy: Winning in the World-Wide Market Place
5. Political Strategy: Managing the Social and Political Environment
• Part Three: Strategy Inputs: Analyzing the External and Internal Environments
6. Industry Analysis: Undertaking Industry Structure and Dynamics
7. Macroenvironmental Analysis: Understanding the Environment Outside the Industry
8. Building the Intelligent Enterprise: Leveraging Resources, Services, and Technology
9. A Strategy for Growth: The Role of Core Competencies in the Corporation
• Part Four: Strategy Making: Identifying and Evaluating Strategic Alternatives
10. Identifying and Developing Strategic Alternatives
11. Evaluating Strategic Alternatives
• Part Five: Managing Strategic Change: Linking Strategy and Action
12. Strategic Change: Realigning the Organization to Implement Strategy
13. Strategic Change: Reconfiguring Operational Processes to Implement Strategy
14. Strategic Change: Managing Strategy Making through Planning and Administrative Systems.
15. Strategic Change: Managing Cultural Processes
16. Re-Inventing Strategy and the Organization: Managing the Present from the Future.

You wanna be bored? Buy and read.