General Information
Instructor(s)
- Business Design (r)
- Consulting (c)
- Leadership and Change Management (c)
Target Audience
How do you implement a strategy once it has been formulated? The perspective taken in this course is that all managers require the conceptual frameworks and action skills to enact change and implement strategy. Any student who will be expected to enact change with or without formal authority (e.g., brand managers; project leaders) are expected to benefit from this class. Students interested in a consulting career (as an external or internal consultant) should also benefit greatly from this course.
This course qualifies for:
- One of the courses to major in Consulting
- One of the courses to specialize in Strategic Management.
Format
In 2021-2022, Professor Kim offers the course as a full semester course in the Summer Term and the Spring Term. The Summer Term will be one 3-hour class per week for 8 weeks and the Spring Term will be one 2-hour class per week for 12 weeks.
Course Scope
In this course, we will direct our attention to the problems of pushing the strategy forward in the organization. Middle and Senior Managers are increasingly responsible for rapidly managing and resolving competing claims for the organization’s limited resources (financial and human). Doing so requires advanced capabilities at managing across functions and business units. Critical, therefore, are the sophisticated leadership and skills required to translate one’s technical knowledge into effective actions in order to implement strategy. Equally important are the “systems” managers must design, maintain, and update in order to facilitate the implementation of the organization’s strategy.
A fundamental objective of this class is to align strategic vision, organizational structure, task, people, reward, and control subsystems. That is, this course is about the interactive relationship of strategic intent and strategy implementation.
In this course, we take the perspective of the general manager whose responsibility is the long-term health of the entire organization or a major division. General managers, from our perspective, are managers who are in the position to make strategic decisions for the organization. Such managers are not “generalists” who know a little bit of everything, but not very much of anything. To be effective, general managers need to have in-depth understanding of the generic problems in all the relevant functional areas. Furthermore, they must be able to deal with problems and issues at the level of the total enterprise and its relationships with the external environment.
Evaluation and Grade Distribution
| Component | Weight |
|---|---|
| Final Assignment | 35% |
| Learning Diary | 45% |
| Class Participation | 20% |
Required Resources
Course reading packet. Each assigned article or chapter will help you address the issues in the corresponding cases. While we may not discuss each non-case reading, failing to read and think about each reading will limit your ability to address that day’s assignment.
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