ABSTRACT

The strategic management course is identified at different schools under a variety of names, e.g., “Business Policy,” “Corporate Planning and Strategy,” or “General Management.” This course is usually designed to give the student a capstone experience in which the concepts, models, techniques, and tools learned in separate, functionally focused courses are integrated into a single unified body of knowledge. The objective of such a course is to imbue within the student an understanding of the firm as a complex system that interacts with a larger, more complex, environment and, further, to provide students with concepts and tools appropriate to managing the firm as a whole. The underlying assumption is that if one understands the firm and its place within the environment, as well as the application of strategic concepts and tools, one can make the firm an active master of its environment.