MGT 607 – Strategies for High Performing Orgs – Week 1

Week 1 – Concept of Strategy, External Analysis and Internal Analysis

This class is going to be centered around reading classic business strategy readings and then analyzing them. The first reading was from Porter and was his classic “What is Strategy” which I found interesting. The readings were well chosen I thought, with Collis’ “Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?” and Sull’s “Why Strategy Execution Unravels” following up. Then an article from Mankins titled “Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance” that lays in the execution piece necessary after creating your strategy, and finally a full out reading from Porter on his Five Forces model, which is talked about routinely in B-School. We also learned about the Resource Based View (RBV), Key Success Factors (KSF), Value Chain Analysis, and an interesting article again from Collis titled “Competing on Resources”.

There is a lot of reading in this class, and I have found that Microsoft Edge lets you highlight PDFs, which makes paper writing much easier.