Organizational Strategy for Competitive Advantage

via Coursera Specialization

Overview

In this Specialization, you’ll learn how to lead and design organizations for stronger performance—and connect those choices to competitive strategy. You’ll start by building practical management judgment: identifying common challenges managers face, improving decision-making, navigating ethical pitfalls, and using power strategically to lead change. You’ll also learn how culture and decision processes shape results, and how to turn real organizational problems into clear, workable recommendations. Next, you’ll shift from managing within an organization to designing it. You’ll analyze organizations from multiple perspectives, plan for effective governance, and build systems that support growth and change. You’ll also learn how the external environment pressures organizations—and how leaders can respond with intentional design choices that help teams execute. From there, you’ll build strategy skills at two levels. In Business Strategy, you’ll learn how organizations create, capture, and maintain value, using tools like industry analysis (including five forces), business models, and strategic positioning to diagnose issues and evaluate alternatives. In Corporate Strategy, you’ll go beyond a single business unit to make decisions about corporate scope, corporate transactions, global strategy, governance, and stakeholder management.

Syllabus

Course 1: Managing the Organization
Course 2: Designing the Organization
Course 3: Business Strategy
Course 4: Corporate Strategy

Courses

18 reviews

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In this course you will learn how organizations create, capture, and maintain value. In doing so, you’ll develop an understanding of how and why this process is fundamental for sustainable competitive advantage. You will be able to better understand value creation, and capture and learn the tools to analyze both competition and cooperation from a variety of perspectives, including the industry-level (e.g., five forces analysis) and the firm-level (e.g., business models and strategic positioning). You will be able to: - Understand how managers coordinate different functional areas, resources, and systems inside a company and align them with the external environment to enhance overall performance - Recognize strategic management tools and frameworks and apply them to real business contexts - Process diverse business and industry information to diagnose strategic issues, evaluate strategic alternatives, and formulate a coherent and actionable strategic plan This course is part of Gies College of Business’ suite of online programs, including the iMBA and iMSM. Learn more about admission into these programs and explore how your Coursera work can be leveraged if accepted into a degree program at https://degrees.giesbusiness.illinois.edu/idegrees/.
1 review

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Organizations are complex and can be difficult to manage well, so managers need tools to help them better understand and deal with the many complexities and challenges associated with organizational life. In this course, you will learn theories, principles, and frameworks that will help you design more effective organizations. You will be able to: - Analyze organizations from multiple perspectives to better understand business challenges - Strategically plan for effective organizational governance - Develop systems to plan for growth and change - Understand implications of the external environment on business and strategically respond to these factors This course is part of Gies College of Business’ suite of online programs, including the iMBA and iMSM. Learn more about admission into these programs and explore how your Coursera work can be leveraged if accepted into a degree program at https://degrees.giesbusiness.illinois.edu/idegrees/.
5 reviews

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This course is intended to help you become a better manager by helping you more fully understand and deal with the complexities and challenges associated with managerial life in organizations. You will learn theories, principles, and frameworks that will help you more effectively manage and lead your organizations. You will be able to: - Analyze common managerial challenges and develop solutions to these challenges - Use power effectively and strategically to implement organizational change - Understand the foundations of organizational culture and decision-making - Navigate common decision-making pitfalls and ethical challenges - Apply principles of organization management to common challenges of management This course is part of Gies College of Business’ suite of online programs, including the iMBA and iMSM. Learn more about admission into these programs and explore how your Coursera work can be leveraged if accepted into a degree program at https://degrees.giesbusiness.illinois.edu/idegrees/.
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In this course you will learn how corporations create, capture, and maintain value, going beyond the management of a single line of business. It is thus a complement to (and should typically follow) a course on Business Strategy, which focuses on developing and sustaining competitive advantage for a single business unit. Here, you will be able to better understand and learn the tools to analyze and manage decisions from a corporate-level perspective, which emphasizes the management of multiple businesses and multiple stakeholders. Examples of such decisions include vertical integration, diversification, mergers and acquisitions, strategic alliances, international expansion, global strategy, corporate governance and corporate social responsibility. You will: • Understand how corporations create and capture value as multi-business enterprises. • Learn tools and frameworks to assess choices regarding corporate scope, corporate transactions and global strategy. • Learn to analyze complex business situations and develop coherent corporate strategies. • Understand the role of corporate governance and stakeholder management in modern companies. This course is part of the iMBA offered by the University of Illinois, a flexible, fully-accredited online MBA at an incredibly competitive price. For more information, please see the Resource page in this course and onlinemba.illinois.edu.