Competing to Win: Business Strategy

O.P. Jindal Global University via Coursera

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Overview

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Competing to Win: Business Strategy in a Rapidly Changing World provides a rigorous, practice-oriented foundation in strategic thinking for managers and professionals operating in complex and uncertain environments. The course moves beyond viewing strategy as a static plan or a set of tools and instead treats it as a disciplined process of making choices, executing them coherently, and renewing them over time as conditions change. The course begins by establishing the core logic of competitive strategy: how firms create and sustain advantage through clear positioning, trade-offs, and an understanding of industry structure. It then examines how competition evolves under technological change, digital platforms, and shifting industry boundaries, highlighting why timing, innovation, and ecosystem dynamics increasingly shape strategic outcomes. Learners are challenged to distinguish between operational effectiveness and strategy, and to recognize why many firms fail not because they lack activity, but because they lack coherence. Building on this foundation, the course addresses corporate-level strategy and global competition. Learners explore decisions about scope, diversification, vertical integration, and global expansion, with particular attention to institutional differences, regulatory environments, and geopolitical risk. The emphasis is on strategic judgment—deciding where and how to compete when markets are fragmented and rules are uneven. The course concludes by focusing on strategic leadership and governance. Strategy is examined as an ongoing organizational process shaped by decision rights, alignment mechanisms, execution logic, and performance systems. Learners gain insight into how strategies are implemented, monitored, and renewed over time, and why leadership discipline and governance are critical to sustaining advantage. Designed for working professionals, the course equips learners with the ability to diagnose strategic situations, make trade-off–based decisions, and lead strategy execution in a rapidly changing world. Course Learning Outcomes: By the end of this course, learners will be able to: 1. Analyze industries, competitors, and firm positions to identify the structural drivers of competition, sources of advantage, and key strategic trade-offs in stable and changing environments. 2. Develop and justify strategic choices about positioning, timing, innovation, scope, and global engagement by evaluating alternatives, assumptions, and risks in rapidly evolving markets. 3. Explain how strategic intent is implemented through decision rights, organizational alignment, execution logic, and performance measurement systems that sustain coherence over time. 4. Assess when and how strategies should be reviewed, adapted, or renewed by interpreting performance feedback, challenging underlying assumptions, and responding to technological, institutional, and geopolitical shifts.

Syllabus

Welcome to Competing to Win - Business Strategy in a Rapidly Changing World
- This module introduces strategy as a disciplined set of choices about where to compete and how to win under conditions of uncertainty and competition. It moves beyond viewing strategy as long-range planning or forecasting and instead frames it as an integrative process of diagnosis, positioning, and coordinated action. The module clarifies the distinction between strategy and operational effectiveness, highlights the role of competition in shaping strategic logic, and examines strategy as a leadership responsibility rather than a technical exercise. Learners are introduced to strategy as both a conceptual framework and a managerial practice for navigating complexity and change. This module also examines how external environments shape competitive advantage. It focuses on defining industries, analyzing industry structure and rivalry, understanding how industries evolve over time, and diagnosing opportunities and threats. Learners explore boundary blurring, strategic groups, consolidation and fragmentation patterns, macro-environmental forces, and competitor behavior, while also recognizing the limits of analytical models in dynamic markets.
Internal Analysis: Strengths, Capabilities, and Strategic Fit
- This module examines strategy from the inside of the firm by focusing on resources, capabilities, and organizational activities that shape competitive advantage. While external analysis highlights opportunities and threats, internal analysis explains why some firms can exploit those opportunities better than others. Learners will study how tangible and intangible resources are combined into capabilities, how value is created through activity systems, and why not all strengths lead to sustainable advantage. The module introduces core frameworks such as the Resource-Based View, VRIO logic, and value chain analysis, while emphasizing their practical limits. It also addresses how strengths and weaknesses should be interpreted dynamically, rather than as static attributes. By the end of the module, learners will understand that strategy depends not only on industry position, but also on the distinctive assets, routines, and coordination mechanisms inside the firm.
Positioning and Competitive Advantage
- This module examines how firms create competitive advantage through strategic positioning. It explores how organizations choose where and how to compete by making trade-offs among activities and value propositions. The module introduces classic positioning logics such as cost leadership, differentiation, and focus strategies, and extends them to modern competitive contexts including hybrid strategies, experience-based differentiation, and platform markets. It also evaluates why some firms struggle with strategic clarity and how internal consistency across activities sustains advantage. Learners will understand both the power and the limits of positioning frameworks and how they must be adapted in dynamic and winner-take-all markets.
Industry Evolution and Strategic Timing
- This module examines how industries evolve over time and how firms must time their strategic moves in relation to technological diffusion, market adoption, and competitive dynamics. It introduces key models of industry evolution, including S-curves, diffusion of innovations, hype cycles, and patterns of disruption, while critically assessing their strategic implications. Rather than treating technology as destiny, the module emphasizes managerial judgment in interpreting adoption signals, anticipating inflection points, and deciding when to invest, wait, or exit. Learners develop an analytically grounded view of timing as a strategic choice shaped by uncertainty, competition, and organizational capabilities.
Platform Competition and Winner-take-all Markets
- This module examines how competition changes in platform-based markets characterized by network effects, multi-sided interactions, and increasing returns to scale. Learners explore why traditional competitive logic often breaks down in such settings and how platform dynamics can lead to winner-take-all or winner-take-most outcomes. The module analyzes strategic choices around platform design, pricing, openness, governance, and timing, as well as the risks of lock-in, tipping, and regulatory intervention. Emphasis is placed on understanding how platforms compete for ecosystems rather than customers alone, and why early advantages can become self-reinforcing.
Strategy and Technology
- This module examines how technological change reshapes strategic choice and industry structure. It focuses on technological paradigms, dominant designs, standards battles, first-mover advantages, and path dependence as mechanisms through which technology alters competition. Learners analyze why some technologies reorganize industries while others fail to do so, how firms compete to define standards, and why early technological commitments constrain later strategic options. Rather than treating technology as destiny, the module emphasizes strategic agency—how firms interpret, shape, and respond to technological change. The module builds analytical skill in evaluating when technology creates opportunity, when it locks firms into disadvantage, and how strategy must adapt as technological regimes evolve.
Corporate-Level Strategy
- Corporate-level strategy addresses the fundamental question of firm scope: which activities and businesses a firm should own, combine, or separate. Unlike competitive strategy, which concerns how firms compete within markets, corporate strategy concerns where firms compete and how their portfolio of activities is structured. This module examines vertical integration and outsourcing, related and unrelated diversification, and the strategic logic of mergers and acquisitions. It also addresses the limits of expansion, including coordination costs, managerial overload, and value destruction from misguided scope choices. Through global examples, learners explore how firms expand or contract boundaries to create—or erode—long-term value.
Strategy in the Global Environment
- This module examines how strategy must be designed and executed when firms compete across countries with different institutional, regulatory, and geopolitical environments. It moves beyond the idea of a single global market to focus on how national context shapes competitive advantage, risk, and strategic choice. Learners explore trade-offs between adaptation and standardization, the configuration of global value chains, the impact of geopolitical risk, and the management of cross-border asymmetries. The module emphasizes strategic judgment under global fragmentation, showing how firms achieve coherence while operating under diverse and often conflicting rules.
Strategic Leadership: Governing the Strategy Process
- This module examines strategy as a governed, ongoing organizational process, not a one-time analytical exercise. It focuses on how strategic intent is translated into action through decision rights, alignment mechanisms, execution logic, and performance systems such as the Balanced Scorecard. Learners explore how leaders design governance structures that enable coordination, accountability, and adaptation over time. The module emphasizes strategic leadership in conditions of uncertainty, complexity, and change, highlighting how strategy must be continuously reviewed, renewed, and re-aligned as environments evolve. The focus is not leadership style, but how strategy is actually run inside organizations.

Taught by

Sunil Sangra

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