Course Catalog

Description

The course is part of the strategic management major. It will familiarize students with most important concepts and major tools of the Harvard school of strategy which was the paradigm for strategy from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. Students will understand why it was so popular and why it was replaced by a multitude of new ideas of how to think about strategy. Ansoff's planning school was quickly joined by the decision school with the SWOT model at the centre of its set of tools. The SWOT model will be discussed so that students will have a firm grasp  of the serious flaws of this model. Michael Porter's positioning school as a  revamped version of its two predecessor schools will have centre stage for much of the course. The BCG matrix and the two models which form its basis (product life cycle and learning curve) will thoroughly analyzed and put in a historic, practical and theoretical context. The lecture will be accompanied by seminaristic tutorials in which the participants will discuss cutting edge articles from the Harvard Business Review and other publications.