AH2018 Management and Strategy 7.5 credits

We will focus on how you develop and implement a consistent and coherent strategy in today’s business world. We build this on three pillars: strategic positioning, capabilities, and change. We start from the analysis of the external competitive environment, looking at industry structure, and assess how a firm can select the best position within this environment. We then move to an analysis of firm resources and capabilities, and focus on the firm’s resource system, and examine the challenge of coordinating the pieces of the puzzle that underpin corporate success. We then turn to look at organisational change: How do you grow a company? What happens when a company’s environment changes? And what do you do if you are in an environment that just keeps on changing? Finally, we look at strategy implementation, and at the way in which the organisational context enables or inhibits us to put this strategy into action.

This course provides an introduction to management and, in particular, and strategy. The objective of the brief management section is to prepare the student for a organizational challenges that managers typially face. Here we will cover organizational forms and incentives, from an economic perspective. In the strategy section, the objective is to provide the student with a few common frameworks to understand and deal with strategic issues that face businesses. The strategy section will, among other things, provide the student with the tools of game theory.

180 credits of university studies including at least 60 credits in mathematics/economics/managerial and documented proficiency in English B or equivalent (TOEFL, IELTS eg).

Besanko, Dranove, Shanley, and Schaefer, Economics of strategy (most recent edition)

• TEN1 - Examination, 7.5 credits, grading scale: A, B, C, D, E, FX, F

Based on recommendation from KTH’s coordinator for disabilities, the examiner will decide how to adapt an examination for students with documented disability.

The examiner may apply another examination format when re-examining individual students.

If the course is discontinued, students may request to be examined during the following two academic years.

Group Assignment, individual written exam

• All members of a group are responsible for the group's work.
• In any assessment, every student shall honestly disclose any help received and sources used.
• In an oral assessment, every student shall be able to present and answer questions about the entire assignment and solution.