Global Strategic Management

Course Number 1534

Associate Professor Jordan Siegel
Fall: Q1; Q2; 3 credits
20 sessions
Paper
Excludes enrollment in Competing Globally (1279 )

Do you aspire to lead a global business? If so, this course provides tools, frameworks, and experience to prepare you for your role. The course is unique not only in focusing on successful strategies for global multinationals, but also in synthesizing Strategy and BGIE topics to examine how companies can cope well with institutional changes in diverse markets.

The course is organized around Prof. Siegel's Top Ten Strategies of Global Multinationals. These strategies range widely, including everything from product strategy recombination to borrowing/renting foreign institutions to arbitraging labor market differences. By taking apart these ten strategies, one can see just how strong a toolkit the global multinational CEO can bring to adding value. At the same time, we go into great detail on the diverse challenges that multinationals face in navigating the stormy seas of diverse institutional pulls and pressures across the markets in which they operate. We navigate this challenging sea with the help of the GIVE Framework, which enables us to decompose the institutional pulls and pressures into their relevant components and design strategies that enable us to succeed in a turbulent world.

Over the course of the semester, we have a set of case experiences that take us around the world. A substantial subset of cases is focused on the key geography of Asia. Yet at the same time we are exposed to a number of cases from Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the U.S. At the end of the semester, we apply the lessons of the course towards a real problem of a global multinational company in a kind of project laboratory. Some projects are sponsored by global multinational companies. In the past we have had projects sponsored by Reebok, Zipcar, and Genzyme among others. Other projects are selected at the initiative of the student and with helpful advice from Prof. Siegel.

Overall, this course is unique in its focus on global strategy formulation and execution while at the same time incorporating the fun elements of institutional analysis you may have loved in your RC BGIE course. The idea is that institutional analysis leads to strategy formulation, which in turn leads to the successful execution of strategy by the leader of the global multinational.