Corporate Strategy

Course Number 1230

Associate Professor Julie Wulf
Winter, 20 Sessions
Paper

Course Content and Organization

Corporations have undergone enormous changes in the last thirty years. Periods of refocusing, and mergers and acquisitions booms, have seemed to alternate with each other in repeated cycles. New forms of corporate organization have come into prominence in many industries, provoking debate about the efficacy of corporate hierarchies. The boundaries of the firm are now open to examination in ways unimagined a mere decade ago. Amidst all this, recommendations---for example, calls to expand corporate organizations versus stick to the knitting, to coordinate and centralize versus delayer and decentralize---have pulled CEOs in many conflicting directions. Indeed, the recommendations have often been as varied as the challenges that corporations face. Not surprisingly, many firms have not made it through any significant length of time intact

The Corporate Strategy course is designed to introduce you to the central strategic challenges facing CEOs in charge of multibusiness firms. The course examines how companies generate and preserve corporate advantage, and the factors that impact a firm's choice of scope, organization, and ownership. In studying a range of firms across a variety of contexts, from global market leaders to start-up companies, the course builds on the analytical tools introduced in nearly all the first-year courses, but particularly Strategy. The course incorporates various theoretical perspectives, yet is designed to focus on the essential issues and problems of corporate strategy as experienced by managers.

Topics covered in the course include:

Corporate Strategies of Related Diversification
What is a corporate strategy? And, what are the elements that comprise any such strategy? The course examines the logic of: (i) where a firm should compete, (ii) how these choices fit with the company's key assets (resources), and (iii) where a firm's boundaries should be drawn in terms of vertical and horizontal extensions of scope. After tackling these questions, we examine the interplay between a company's corporate strategy and its mode of internal organization.

Conglomerates and Unrelated Diversification
Focusing on broadly diversified multi-business unit corporations and conglomerates, we will analyze the historical dominance of the conglomerate form of organization, the reasons behind its decline, and the types of organizations that emerged as substitutes. We will then assess why conglomerates thrive today in some markets but not in others and why some conglomerates exhibit superior sustained performance.

Corporate Strategy: Dynamics, Sustainability, and Change
Changes in the competitive, technological, or regulatory environment often dictate that corporate strategies be adjusted or altered over time. We will focus on such dynamic considerations head-on, and the sustainability of corporate strategies. The specific cases examine different arenas -with a focus on media and entertainment businesses. We will explore several methods of change, for example, in some cases, corporations affect change via a significant merger; in other cases, through greenfield expansion; and, in still other cases, largely through internal transformation. The objective is to examine certain challenges that are common to these disparate settings.