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University of Bath MSc in Management Strategic Management, Professor Edmund R Thompson Contacts: Room 8W 3.10. Email [email protected] Contact hours: Anytime, just email to arrange.

Welcome to your course Our aim in the course will be to ensure that you can all understand in an applied, logical, practical, realist and overtly business manner the nature and context (i) of firms’ competitive and corporate strategies and (ii) the overall strategic imperatives of firms in dynamic and competitive domestic and international environments. Our aim is to do this in an enjoyable and, importantly, memorable manner.

Deliverable By the end of the course you will have the beginnings of the tools necessary to analyse, predict, and formulate strategic responses for any kind of firm (of any size, in any sector, anywhere on earth) to address successfully the competitive realities of an evolving international business environment that encompasses not just competitors, suppliers and buyers, but the powerful effects of current social/cultural/political/economic/religious/other extant realties and future trends. You will also gain insights into the kind of firms that you might most advantageously seek to work in or manage or create for a personally prosperous, fulfilling and enjoyable future. You will also see how the strategic imperatives of firms can be applied to how you develop your own personal competitive and ‘corporate’ strategies as an individual who will always need to compete directly with those others who want for themselves the scarce things you want for yourself.

Approach To deliver on the above you will constantly be challenged to raise the quality and depth of your critical and analytical thinking. I shall be challenging you to lift the level of your own analytical approaches by questioning and challenging whatever preconceived ideas and notions you may hitherto have accepted uncritically, both in the field of strategy and beyond. Successfully achieving this requires a broader-ranging approach than you might expect, and some of you may find it personally challenging, and even possibly disconcerting, at least initially. This is an applied, practical, real business-oriented course. Not an exclusively academic, theoretical and conceptually-oriented course. Your course has been developed based on my years of consulting with real firms (and governments), and teaching senior managers during inhouse executive training programs I have devised and delivered around the world. Your course with me has not been lazily lifted direct from some quotidian student textbook written by an academic who may or may not have any practical business experience. Your course has been 1

designed specifically for those wanting to shift from a typical student way of thinking to a more mature business manager/entrepreneurial way of thinking. You will be treated as individuals transitioning into the real world of business. You will be treated, therefore, as adults seeking to have successful business careers, not as ‘students’ whose main aim is an easy high grade. You are, in consequence, expected also to behave, respond and participate as adults seeking to succeed in business. You are here to learn something of enduring use to your lives and careers, and to learn how to think effectively about business strategy from an applied and realist-senior-manager perspective (as opposed to the perspective of a textbook-oriented student of limited employability and little value in the real world of business). Achieving both of these requires thinking critically and analytically. Learning how to do these better means rethinking how you think logically AND feel emotively about many things you might have considered you need not think about. My job is to help you in this process, part of which will mean me playing devil’s advocate on occasion. The strategic environment is necessarily global and encompasses a wide and disparate range of human beliefs, habits, customs, systems and conventions that impinge upon the strategic management of firms, both domestic and international. You will be invited to question and critically appraise many of these with a view to you developing the kind of unerringly sceptical and questioning approach to strategic management (and to your own careers) that is necessary for you to succeed in an ever changing and increasingly difficult and competitive world. You will find it advantageous to adopt an open-minded, logical, realist, and reasonable approach. For the purposes of this course, and for a successful business career, you will need to be extremely open-minded; much more open-minded than you might currently think necessary. Questioning all assumptions and reassessing their coherence, value and relevance can be uncomfortable, sometimes very, very uncomfortable. But an agnostic and logical approach free of preconceptions and prejudice will help. As will a sense of humour. And remember, offence is something that can only really ever be taken, not given. If you ever begin to feel offended, it is usually a sign that you have let your emotions take precedence over your rational brain. In business decision making, especially strategy, using emotive feelings is always an error. Calm, logical calculation is the basis of effective strategy, and it the basis on which you can most advantageously approach learning from your class with me. Keeping the above points in mind cannot be stressed highly enough if you are to understand and prosper in an international strategic management environment that is changing faster and more radically than you may hitherto have imagined. Hence, I stress, please be open-minded, leave your prejudices and preconceptions at the classroom door, and dust down your logical self and your personal sense of humour, you’ll very likely need them. Not just for your classes with me, but in your futures: Strategic management in both domestic and international contexts demands (i) a cosmopolitan outlook, (ii) the ability rationally to reassess treasured but often illogical, parochial, outdated, untenable and/or useless (sometimes even dangerous) beliefs and largely emotive feeling, and (iii) the wisdom to recognise and laugh at your own folly combined with cunning calculation to exploit the folly (and common sense) of others. Strategy is a topic that has attracted a vast amount of meaningless jargon self-servingly created by management consultants and, sadly, business school professors who seek to create an air of mysteriousness about strategic management. While management consultants and business school professors might benefit from this proliferation of contrived verbal artifice, I am not aware of any firms (or students) that have. Our approach will be to demystify strategic 2

management and break it down into its basic and really rather simple elements that don’t, in truth, extend much beyond some straightforward and basic economics and fundamental psychology. You are here to learn what strategy really is, how to analyse the actual strategies (or lack of strategies) of real firms, how to assess the effects of social/cultural/political/economic/religious/other factors that affect strategy, and begin to think about how to formulate strategy that will actually work rather than just sound fancy and sophisticated to those who think only superficially. My aim is to ensure that you will never be confused, impressed or awed by glib and vacuous nonsense peddled by many management consultants and, regrettably, far too many business school professors. Successful strategy begins with a desire and an ability to call a spade a spade rather than a multi-material, frequently multi-faceted fabrication utilized, generally manually, to excavate apertures in or move soil and similar terrestrial media. Please keep this in (your open) mind as we proceed logically through your course.

Evaluation Evaluation overview The evaluation mechanism of this unit has been designed (i) to be objective and fair, (ii) to facilitate formative feedback, and (iii) to be an integral part of your learning process by ensuring that concepts, analytical frameworks, and causal dynamics covered in classes in a predominantly inductive and theoretical manner are applied in a deductive and practical managerial context to a specific firm in the real word. You will personally select the firm you analyse and in effect produce your own case-study. However, unlike case studies produced by me and other academics for teaching purposes, your case study will not be a stylized and partial, often untrue, often unreal, backward-looking and outdated account of a firm or a strategic situation. Instead it will be a systematic, logical, forward-looking and evidence-based analytical case study of a firm in real-time. Overall, you will be critically analysing both (i) the existing competitive and (ii) corporate strategic actions and imperatives of a publicly quoted private (as opposed to state-controlled) firm of your own choice, and (iii) how your firm should respond strategically to the challenges of a dynamically evolving and globally competitive business environment. The publicly quoted firm must meet these specific criteria: x Your publicly quoted firm CANNOT be a state-owned or controlled firm. x Your publicly quoted, non-state-owned or controlled firm CANNOT be a subsidiary of a firm (if you are interested in a particular subsidiary, you will still need to analyse the parent firm and ALL its other subsidiaries). x Your publicly quoted firm MUST have operations of one sort or another in at least two or more countries. Selecting a firm that meets all the above criteria is your own personal and exclusive responsibility. Please be very careful to ensure that you select a firm that does genuinely fully

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meet ALL these criteria as, in fairness to those who get it right, no exceptions under any circumstances can be made for any selection errors made. Only ONE student may select any given firm, so you will want to select your firm as soon as possible, but have some alternative firms in mind should one of your classmates select that firm before you. Start to think about the firm you want to select as soon as possible so that you can begin to see how what we cover in classes can be applied to critically analysing your own selected firm. You select your firm by going to the Master Degree office where you will find a sign-up sheet for selecting your firm (ask one of the very helpful and nice people there for the sign-up sheet). Firms are taken on a first-come-first-served basis, and there can be no exceptions to this. Make sure you personally check that no other classmate has already selected your initial choice. In order (i) to optimise the learning process of your evaluation, (ii) to facilitate opportunity for feedback geared to helping you maximise your performance, and (iii) to break up the overall evaluation into a structured sequence of temporally manageable tasks that provide objectivity and fairness to your grade, your evaluation is broken down into two interlinked components: x

The first is a formative paper. Formative papers of course get a grade, but are also partly designed deliberately to facilitate feedback. Hence you will get personal feedback on this formative paper to help you with your second paper.

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The second component is a summative paper that is completed instead of having a formal invigilated examination. Your summative paper will be handed in after the course has ended during the examination period. As such, this second paper is designed specifically as an examination of your understanding and application all that you have learned during the whole course, and is specifically not designed as a vehicle for feedback. Accordingly, as with examination results, your grade for your summative paper will be available only when formal results are released after all examination board procedures have been completed.

Component 1. A 1,000-word* formative paper, 30% of grade Deadline: 3pm 9th April, one hard copy to office plus soft copy via moodle. You can, of course, submit prior to the deadline. Keep in mind that responsibility for meeting this deadline and hand-in procedure is yours alone. Both the hard and soft copies must be submitted by the deadline, no exceptions I’m afraid. So, for example, if only the soft copy is submitted by the deadline, it will not count as being submitted until the hard copy is also submitted, and vice versa, with standard University penalties for late submission applying. Any discrepancy between the hard and soft copies are of course not allowed and will attract standard University penalties. Your formative paper has been designed in part specifically to give you formative feedback to help with your second paper, so do please ensure you hand it in on time so you can get timely feedback as quickly as possible. Topic: What, and how effective, is the current competitive strategy of one or a group of the main products of your selected firm? Length: The 1,000 words maximum refers to main text and INCLUDES the University 10% leeway. Tables, charts, figures, appendices, etc, do not count towards the word limit. Please 4

stick to the word limit as, in fairness to students who do adhere to the word limit, papers that exceed the word limit will be graded only on the first 1,000 words. The word length is deliberately short to encourage the kind of concise, direct, well-researched, data-informed and well-structured paper that one would be expected to produce in the real world of business, and to discourage the typical descriptive, theory-heavy, historically-oriented, data-poor and analytically limited undergraduate-style ‘essay’ that is entirely inappropriate in the real world of management and this course. You must state on your paper your main text’s exact word length. Guidance: Your formative paper should critically, logically and objectively assess what, and how effective, is the current competitive strategy of one or a group of the main products of your selected firm. This will be (i) in the context of discussions, theories and analytical frameworks we have gone through in the class, (ii) your wider reading, and (iii) on the basis of empirical evidence. Grading: Papers will be graded by their (i) quality and extent of evidential basis, (ii) rigour, (iii) objectivity, and (iv) quality of critical analysis, with excellent work exhibiting (a) sceptical appraisal of relevant facts, (b) concision, (c) clarity, (d) logical argumentation, (e) systematic structure, and (f) appropriately professional use of referencing, data, and appendices, plus apposite exhibits in terms of charts, figures and tables. You personally are responsible for producing all of the foregoing. Your arguments and structure will necessarily be determined by the peculiarities of your selected firm and the nature of your personal critical analysis, so there is no ‘model’ or ‘ideal’ paper, and part of your grade will be for how your analysis, arguments and structure convey critically meaningful points. Accordingly, and deliberately, no template or specimen paper will be given. An excellent essay will constitute a comprehensive, logical and evidence-based critical analysis of what, and how effective, is the current competitive strategy of one or a group of the main products of your selected firm. So anything that does not directly address this will not add usefully to your paper or, hence, grade. Take particular note of the words current, logical, evidence, critical, analysis, and structure used above. Considerable further guidance will be given verbally throughout our classes, but do take careful note of what is written above. *Please note that the 1,000 words INCLUDE the 10% leeway for all word limits in Bath (hence the word limit is in fact 909.091 words). Also note that your hard copy should be stapled together with your plagiarism declaration in the TOP LEFT CORNER only. Do not use paper clips (they fall off) and do not trouble yourself to use expensive binders or plastic folders (they just get removed and thrown away). Only a simple single staple in the top left corner is required, nothing else. If you have colour graphs and charts, please avoid printing in black and white as they’ll tend to come out grey and are hard, sometimes impossible, to see properly.

Component 2. A 3,000-word* summative paper, 70% of grade Deadline: 12 noon Monday 21st May, one hard copy to office plus soft copy via moodle. You can, of course, submit prior to the deadline. Keep in mind that responsibility for meeting this deadline and hand-in procedure is yours alone. Both the hard and soft copies must be submitted by the deadline, no exceptions. So, for example, if only the soft copy is submitted by the deadline, it will not count as being submitted until the hard copy is also submitted, and vice versa, with standard University penalties for late submission applying. Any discrepancy 5

between the hard and soft copies are not allowed and will attract standard University penalties. While this summative element of your evaluation has been designed to take the place of an examination and is specifically not a vehicle for feedback, it is still very important that you hand your summative paper in on time so that formal examination board procedures can be adhered to so your grade can be released to you when formal results are announced. Topic: How successful are the current competitive and corporate strategies of your selected firm (the whole firm, not just a single subsidiary or its operations in one geographical or product area), and how might they be affected by, and have to respond to, the forward and backward forces of globalization? Length: The 3,000 words maximum refers to main text and INCLUDES the University 10% leeway. Tables, charts, figures, appendices, do not count towards the word limit. Please stick to the word limit as, in fairness to students who do adhere to the word limit, papers that do not stick to the word limit will be graded only on the first 3,000 words. You must state on your paper your main text’s exact word length. Again, the word length is deliberately relatively short to encourage the kind of concise, direct, well-researched, data-informed and wellstructured paper that one would be expected in the real world of business, and to discourage the often theory-describing, data-poor and analytically limited undergraduate-style ‘essay’ that is inappropriate in the real world of management, and so inappropriate in this course. Guidance: This summative essay will, to a limited degree, build upon (but NOT repeat) your 1,000 word essay’s critical analysis and conclusions, but will predominantly focus on (i) a critical analysis and synthesis of your firm’s overall current competitive and corporate strategies in order to develop a considered, evidence-based and future-oriented appraisal of (ii) how the most germane dynamics within the overall international business environment will affect your selected firm and (iii) how it might respond in strategic terms to those dynamics. Grading: Grading will be divided broadly equally between (i), (ii), and (iii) in the above paragraph. Again, papers will be assessed by their (i) quality and extent of evidential base, (ii) thoroughness and rigour and (iii) quality of critical analysis, with excellent work exhibiting (a) sceptical appraisal of relevant facts, (b) concision, (c) clarity, (d) logical argumentation, (e) systematic structure, and (f) appropriately professional use of referencing, data, and appendices, plus apposite exhibits in terms of charts, figures and tables. You personally are responsible for producing all of the foregoing. Again, your analysis, arguments and structure will necessarily be determined by the peculiarities of your selected firm and the nature of your personal critical assessments/projections, so again there is no ‘model’ or ‘ideal’ paper, and part of your grade will again be for how your arguments and structure convey meaningful points. Once again, in consequence and deliberately, no template or specimen paper will be given. An excellent paper will constitute (i) a comprehensive, rational and evidence-based critic...