ILRHR 4640 - Business Strategy

Spring. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Enrollment limited to: junior and senior students.

J.R. Keller.

The ability to evaluate and create business strategies is a critical skill for managers across industries, functions, and geographies. This course introduces a variety of concepts and tools that help to develop an understanding of how strategies are formed and managed, and how competitive advantage might be created and sustained. We discuss different business models, the importance of understanding your customers, how to identify and evaluate a firm’s resources and capabilities, how to make sense of and adapt to changes in a firm’s competitive environment and how to anticipate and respond to competitors. Creating a business strategy is a fun, interactive process; the class is designed to mirror this through the use of numerous real-world case studies, supplemented by a mix of in-class activities and interactive lectures. The course concludes with a series of case competitions, including a final competition judged by a panel of external strategy experts.