Business Strategy

Course Overview

Every healthy business, big or small, requires a clear strategy—a unifying objective—to assure its long-term competitiveness and value creation for shareholders. Without one, long-lasting sustainability, profitability and organisational alignment would be in jeopardy. This course introduces students to the main theories, concepts and models of business strategy and the importance of analysis in management practice. As part of their strategy design, students will learn to formulate strategic goals, values, vision and mission statements and understand how competition and industry both affect competitive advantage. Further, they will also learn how organisations create and sustain a cost-leadership edge and manage to differentiate from other firms in the marketplace. After completion of this course, students will be able to design, implement and analyse the effectiveness of a business strategy.

Cambridge Faculty: Allegre Hadida, Ph.D.

Dr. Allègre Hadida is a University Senior Lecturer in Strategy and the Director of the M.Phil in Management Programme at Cambridge Judge Business School and Fellow of Magdalene College. Her Corporate Strategy MBA Course was ranked 6th in the world by the Financial Times. Dr. Hadida has won numerous awards for her research, including the Best Paper Prize at AIMAC (International Association for Arts and Cultural Management) in 2011, and her scholarly work has been published in the Harvard Business Review and in international peer-reviewed journals, including Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes. Her innovative work as a researcher and educator has been noted in the press, including The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and BBC Online.

Learning Outcomes 

• Demonstrate a clear understanding of the nature of strategy and its corporate, competitive and institutional contexts. 
• Define the strengths and limitations of strategic analysis, and describe how it fits into the overall strategy process. 
• Show mastery of a range of frameworks, methods and practices of strategic analysis and have a clear appreciation of their foundations, usefulness, scope of applicability, qualifications and limitations.