I will group the entire course into one post. I will be completely honest, I found this course to be the largest waste of time and tuition dollars. The entire course was comprised of exams based on the previous eight classes that I took. On many of these exams, there were questions I was sure …

Week 5 – Quality Management and Lean Systems Our final week and I found myself taking off Friday just to get everything submitted on time. We talk about another favorite of mine and that is quality. I like the idea of quality, of incrementally improving step by step towards the unattainable. There is hope in …

Week 4 – Operations Strategy We delved into strategy by reading “What is Strategy” by Kryscynski and “Don’t Just Create Value – Capture It” by Ryall. We also read Iansiti’s “Operations Strategy”. This was a content heavy week with topics I would expect in an MBA class. We talked about the Value Capture Model (VCM) …

Week 3 – Risk Management and Resilience We read two papers, one titled “Building Resilient Supply Chains Won’t Be Easy” by Levi and one titled “From Risk to Resilience: Learning to Deal with Disruptions” by Fiksel. We learned about stress testing to identify points of weakness and risk. We also went into supply chain vulnerabilities …

Week 2 – Sustainability I am not a fan of what is considered “sustainability” unless it relates to building resiliency to market forces. I believe much of the environmental impacts people fret over with NIMBYism is just shipped overseas with more relaxed measures in place and to let those places suffer. It makes sense to …

Week 1 – Intro to Supply Chain and Clusters The focus on this class will be in supply chains. The professor has extensive experience in supply chains so there will be real world examples in the lectures. The majority of the class looks to be case studies and papers, with exams, and discussion posts. There …

Week 5 – Industry Dynamics and Firm Innovation We finish up the final week with a bit of a busy schedule. We are expected to both finish up a traditional fifth week of work and a final week that includes a consultant type slide deck for Wendy’s, which is currently undergoing financial difficulty. Our readings …

Week 4 – International Strategy This week is the same as those before, with a reflection and discussion post on specific topics, which are essentially papers to be written. The readings included Ghemawats “Distance Still Matters” where we explored barriers due to geography. We explored Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and how those six items can help …

Week 3 – Corporate Level Strategies We continued our readings and diving into corporate strategy. Again we started off with a Porter reading, this one his “From Competitive Advantage to Corporate Strategy” article. Then we went into Prahalad’s “The Core Competence of the Corporation” and reviewed vertical integration and portfolio management as well as diversification …

Week 2 – Business Level Strategy We continued reading influential classic business papers this week, with Porter’s famous “Generic Competitive Strategies.” We talked about differentiation, overall cost leadership, and focus in one of those categories. We then read “Blue Ocean Strategy” by Kim, which I’ve actually read before ever starting my MBA program because I …