Strategic Management 01 – Business Model You and Alaska Gold Mine Case

Today we met for the first time with the MBA students of Estonian Business School for a strategic management class. A group of 32 managed to kick off the semester and discuss the main requirements of the course for the upcoming seminars. A couple of words about the topics covered.

1. As most participants did not have previous professional work experience then we started off with the basic introductory building blocks of strategic management and thereafter focused to Business Model You, which is a nice and practical tool to reflect upon our own experience and try to build up our own business plans. Especially when starting with a school or a new study programme it is worthwhile to spend some time in analysing what is really important in our lives and how can we all be one-person businesses. Sometimes our one-person may strategy materialise in a grandiose future business plan. In other instances the one-person strategy could just serve us with some tools of thinking on how to be a better employee in your existing organization.
2. At the final part of our discussion we opened a quick pandora’s box into decision making and risk handling by using Alaska Gold Mine case.

You may find the slides of the class below.

http://www.slideshare.net/markorillo/strategic-management-introductory-class-business-concept-and-business-model-you

Please remember the homework during the next week:

• Register markorillo.com/for-students – materials and forum
• Register www.linkedin.com – fill in your CV and identify your key interests related to strategic management, connect with each other and with myself as “Friend”
• Quick overview and your comment of the most important weekly news on strategic management. Add the information about the first week here.
• Go to the library to choose a single Harvard Business Review, select an HBR Case study and write your analysis to the forum
• Upload your personal business models!

In addition – I suggest you to group rather soon so that you could have a nice 3-person team for your upcoming homework. Please add here the information about your team and about the case company that you select for your analysis (deadline 19.10, presentation on 20.10)

Remark about the home reading for the next week:

• Barney, J (1991) Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage. Journal of Management. Vol 17, no. 1, pp 99-120.
  
• Christensen & Raynor, 2003. Why Hard-Nosed Executives Should Care About Management Theory. Harvard Business Review, 81(5): 67-74.
• Weihrich, H. (1982) The TOWS Matrix—A Tool for Situational Analysis. Long-Range Planning, April.