Introduction to revised MNGT 5650

Welcome to the newly revised Management and Strategy (MNGT 5650). The focus of this course is somewhat different than traditional strategic management courses in that the focus is on both strategy and strategic thinking - two separate but related concepts. This course provides a single robust framework that includes both strategic thinking and strategy (resource movement) and applies the learning using the Capstone Simulation which is an immersive experience for students.

This course combines classic strategic management concepts (e.g. internal and external analysis, SWOT, competitive advantage)as found in traditional strategic management textbooks, with a new approach to understanding the concept of 'strategy', through understanding resource movement, when and why a company would attack, defend, retreat (or avoid) relative to any battle. "Choose your battles" becomes the metaphor that explains this course's approach to teaching strategic thinking. The Attack-Defend-Retreat-Avoid framework (abbreviated to "ADR") of strategic thinking is provided as the foundation for course, and then traditional strategic management concepts are shown to link (and support) the ADR framework. In this way, the pedagogy is to use the ADR framework to demonstrate (and place into context) how the various classic strategic management concepts apply in strategic decision making. To be clear, this new course focuses on teaching students how to make the best strategic decision, not just various "strategies" as found in traditional textbooks. We use the Capstone Simulation to provide a competitive context for students to make strategic decisions. Those who learn and can better apply to strategic framework tend to do much better on the Capstone Simulation.

The goal of this course is to teach students an approach to strategy and strategic thinking in a competitive environment. The word "strategy" is ambiguous and means different things to people. The course directly deals with this ambiguity by clarifying the meaning of the word "strategy" as actual resource commitment in any direction (i.e. attacking, defending, retreating, or avoiding resource commitment). It is important to reinforce this learning point to students to keep them 'on track', otherwise students will also define "strategy" as virtually anything they are doing, and this is inadequate and meaningless. So we need to do better at getting to a concrete definition of 'strategy', and this course does just that. It is up to the instructor to reinforce this learning point at each opportunity early on in the course, until students grasp the concept.