Are you wondering how you can play a larger role in the strategic management of your organization? Are you about to embark on a strategic planning exercise? or want to initiate one? Do you want to deepen your understanding of how business strategy gets formulated and executed? Well, then this is the course for you. My name is Blair cook.

And I'm a many times CFO and a corporate director, and I have direct experience with the strategic management with dozens of companies I've been involved with over my career. It also happens to be one of those areas that I study extensively. In fact, this is the fourth generation of this course. It doesn't mean that the three previous generations were wrong, per se, but strategy is one of those subject matters that the more exposure you get, and the more you learn about it, the deeper your understanding. Strategic Management is the backbone of many MBA programs. And in the next hour, I'm going to hit all the highlights Give you some structure and some tools to help you make a strategic contribution to your organization.

Let's begin with first considering your role in this strategy process at your organization. Because let's face it, not all of us have this exposure or responsibility. In fact, I pulled the performative community just to assess the status of finance in the strategic development process. In my poll, only 12% of participants indicated that they had a leadership role in the strategic discussions. 43% of those surveyed were participants in the strategy conversation, and another 42% either have a limited role, or none at all. Strategic Management is often thought to be something reserved for only large companies.

Nothing can be further from the truth, in fact, by virtue of the fact that your organization is still in business Today implies you have a strategy. But the questions for many organization to always continuously be considering are, is it the right strategy? In other words, are there other alternatives that could be more profitable or more effective? Is our strategy well executed? Many organizations experience symptoms of poor execution? These might manifest themselves in unprofitable product lines or customers, high prevalence of errors and a lack of cross functional cooperation.

And finally, will your current strategy continue to be successful for years to come? This starts getting at the essence of strategy and thinking about the longer term positioning outside of our day to day conduct of our business. Let's also recognize that strategy is often I broadly applied concept, one manager might position a new customer relationship management system as a strategic and new Have another might say that employee retention is the key strategic issue. Yet another focused on entering say a new line of business says when has everything we do in business becomes so strategic, and is everything strategic. In today's application of the concept of strategy, you need to become very comfortable and aware that strategy has many layers to it. All of these issues may be labeled as strategic.

However, there's a clear hierarchy and ordering to consider the issue of whether to enter into a new line of business supersedes the implementation of a CRM system or new policies aimed at employee retention. Strategy is all about positioning. And there's two ways to think about positioning. The first is to consider the external context, which includes your customer needs, the market, the industry, the macroeconomic environment, among others, and then identified The ideal place for you to operate within that universe. The other way to look at positioning is to consider your own unique internal capabilities and aspirations and then find a place in the universe where those particular capabilities would be highly and profitably rewarded. Strategic Management theory considers both the internal and external context when it comes to formulating strategy.

The larger the organization, the more people talk about strategy. And it doesn't mean the strategy is any more or less important in a large context than it is in a small one. But this dimension of size also compounds the complexity of implementing and executing strategy. The larger an organization gets, the greater the importance of communicating and aligning the strategy to the resources of the company. This would include engaging the employees configuring information systems and investing in the right assets to support the execution of the desired strategy. I think these statistics from a Harvard Business School study say at all when it comes to evaluating how effective the business world is at developing and implementing strategy, I particularly like the last one 5% of the workforce, understand the strategy of their organization.

Remind me again, who boards and executives rely on to execute their brilliant strategies. Big Idea number one is that if you haven't already, just write down the existing strategy and share it. This forces the executives or the owners to articulate their objectives, then see what happens. Ideally, we'll add clarity and alignment for our employees. It also is the first step to leveraging strategic thinking across the organization. Many great strategies originate from outside of the executive boardroom.

This is the first baby step toward implementing a strategic management process, which we are going to talk about more in this course. I'm going to describe strategic management in terms of four phases throughout this course. To start out though, our first lesson, we're going to talk about different approaches to strategy formulation. I want to tell you how you can recognize and approve your own ability to gain strategic insight, like you're the next Steve Jobs of your industry. In the second lesson, we're going to set the table by talking about the future state in terms of mission, vision and values. This is one of the most important aligning mechanisms of the strategic management process that unfortunately, is either ignored or given lip service by most organizations.

In our third lesson, we will talk about the importance of assessing our current state. I've developed a visual and conceptual way of interpreting your SWOT analysis like you're crazy might read tea leaves, so you don't want to miss that. In our fourth lesson, we will take those tea leaves from the SWOT analysis and formulate strategic alternatives. In our fifth lesson, we're going to look at Performance Management and evaluating whether the strategy is working. If it's not working, how do we diagnose our strategic issue and what can be done to get it back on track? Stay tuned.

So hold on your hats. We're going to cover your MBA in one hour. I'm Blair cook, and I hope you'll join me by clicking on that first lesson to begin