Bruce Ahlstrand is a senior faculty member in the Business Administration program at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. [1] A graduate of the University of Toronto, the London School of Economics and University of Oxford, Ahlstrand has been contributing to the field of strategic management for many years. With Henry Mintzberg and Joseph Lampel, he wrote the book Strategy Safari. At Trent University, Ahlstrand teaches courses in Organization Theory (AD 251) and Strategic Management (AD 400) which are both part of the core program in management studies at Trent. [1]
Ahlstrand's international bestselling book [2] Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through the Wilds of Strategic Management is widely considered a classic work in the field. It has been translated into more than 15 languages, including, Chinese, Russian and French, and has been used in MBA programs around the world. [3] His highest cited publication is Strategy Safari, [4] according to Google Scholar. [5]
Strategy is a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty. In the sense of the "art of the general", which included several subsets of skills including military tactics, siegecraft, logistics etc., the term came into use in the 6th century C.E. in Eastern Roman terminology, and was translated into Western vernacular languages only in the 18th century. From then until the 20th century, the word "strategy" came to denote "a comprehensive way to try to pursue political ends, including the threat or actual use of force, in a dialectic of wills" in a military conflict, in which both adversaries interact.
Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to attain strategic goals.
Henry Mintzberg is a Canadian academic and author on business and management. He is currently the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he has been teaching since 1968.
In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates. Strategic management provides overall direction to an enterprise and involves specifying the organization's objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve those objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the plans. Academics and practicing managers have developed numerous models and frameworks to assist in strategic decision-making in the context of complex environments and competitive dynamics. Strategic management is not static in nature; the models can include a feedback loop to monitor execution and to inform the next round of planning.
Porter's Five Forces Framework is a method of analysing the operating environment of a competition of a business. It draws from industrial organization (IO) economics to derive five forces that determine the competitive intensity and, therefore, the attractiveness of an industry in terms of its profitability. An "unattractive" industry is one in which the effect of these five forces reduces overall profitability. The most unattractive industry would be one approaching "pure competition", in which available profits for all firms are driven to normal profit levels. The five-forces perspective is associated with its originator, Michael E. Porter of Harvard University. This framework was first published in Harvard Business Review in 1979.
SWOT analysis is a strategic planning and strategic management technique used to help a person or organization identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats related to business competition or project planning. It is sometimes called situational assessment or situational analysis. Additional acronyms using the same components include TOWS and WOTS-UP.
Information management (IM) is the appropriate and optimized capture, storage, retrieval, and use of information. It may be personal information management or organizational. IM for organizations concerns a cycle of organizational activity: the acquisition of information from one or more sources, the custodianship and the distribution of that information to those who need it, and its ultimate disposal through archiving or deletion and extraction.
Michael Eugene Porter is an American academic known for his theories on economics, business strategy, and social causes. He is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School, and was one of the founders of the consulting firm The Monitor Group and FSG, a social impact consultancy. He is credited for creating Porter's five forces analysis, which is instrumental in business strategy development at present. He is generally regarded as the father of the modern strategy field. He is also regarded as one of the world's most influential thinkers on management and competitiveness as well as one of the most influential business strategists. His work has been recognized by governments, non governmental organizations and universities.
Human resource management is the strategic and coherent approach to the effective and efficient management of people in a company or organization such that they help their business gain a competitive advantage. It is designed to maximize employee performance in service of an employer's strategic objectives. Human resource management is primarily concerned with the management of people within organizations, focusing on policies and systems. HR departments are responsible for overseeing employee-benefits design, employee recruitment, training and development, performance appraisal, and reward management, such as managing pay and employee benefits systems. HR also concerns itself with organizational change and industrial relations, or the balancing of organizational practices with requirements arising from collective bargaining and governmental laws.
The Profit Impact of Market Strategy (PIMS) program is a project that uses empirical data to try to determine which business strategies make the difference between success and failure. It is used to develop strategies for resource allocation and marketing. Some of the most important strategic metrics are market share, product quality, investment intensity and service quality. One of the emphasized principles is that the same factors work identically across different industries. The business management authors Tom Peters and Nancy Austin wrote that PIMS "yields solid evidence in support of both common sense and counter-intuitive principles for gaining and sustaining competitive advantage".
Futures studies, futures research, futurism, or futurology is the systematic, interdisciplinary and holistic study of social/technological advancement, and other environmental trends; often for the purpose of exploring how people will live and work in the future. Predictive techniques, such as forecasting, can be applied, but contemporary futures studies scholars emphasize the importance of systematically exploring alternatives. In general, it can be considered as a branch of the social sciences and an extension to the field of history. Futures studies seeks to understand what is likely to continue and what could plausibly change. Part of the discipline thus seeks a systematic and pattern-based understanding of past and present, and to explore the possibility of future events and trends.
Design management is a field of inquiry that uses design, strategy, project management and supply chain techniques to control a creative process, support a culture of creativity, and build a structure and organization for design. The objective of design management is to develop and maintain an efficient business environment in which an organization can achieve its strategic and mission goals through design. Design management is a comprehensive activity at all levels of business, from the discovery phase to the execution phase. "Simply put, design management is the business side of design. Design management encompasses the ongoing processes, business decisions, and strategies that enable innovation and create effectively-designed products, services, communications, environments, and brands that enhance our quality of life and provide organizational success." The discipline of design management overlaps with marketing management, operations management, and strategic management.
Michael M. Kaiser is an American arts administrator who served as president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (2001–2014) in Washington, D.C.
Vladimir L’vovich Kvint is a Russian-American economist who is the Chair of the Department of Economic and Financial Strategy at the Moscow School of Economics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. He is President of the International Academy of Emerging Markets. He is a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Kenneth Richmond Andrews, was an American academic who, along with H. Igor Ansoff and Alfred D. Chandler, was credited with the foundational role in introducing and popularizing the concept of business strategy.
Richard Whittington is an academic in the area of Corporate Strategy. Currently, he is a Professor of Strategic Management at the Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. Whittington has been influential in the Strategy-as-Practice approach, a more sociological and less managerial approach to the study of business and corporate strategy. He was previously an Associate Editor at the Strategic Management Journal.
The Strategic Management Society (SMS) is a professional society for the advancement of strategic management. The society consists of nearly 3,000 members representing various backgrounds and perspectives from more than eighty different countries. Membership is composed of academics, business practitioners, and consultants. The society has been credited with being a factor in the development of strategic management as a legitimate field of scholarly endeavor. The SMS publishes the Strategic Management Journal, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal and the Global Strategy Journal.
The Tepper School of Business is the business school of Carnegie Mellon University. It is located in the university's 140-acre (0.57 km2) campus in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
A Bachelor of Management or a Bachelor of Management Studies is an undergraduate degree program offered by numerous universities worldwide. This program equips students with the knowledge and skills necessary to assume management roles in a variety of organizations. It provides a solid foundation in organizational behavior and human resource management, while also allowing students to specialize in specific areas of interest through elective courses such as labor-management relations, negotiation, conflict resolution, compensation systems, and organizational development. Additionally, this degree program provides insights into how organizations function, how they are managed, and their interactions with object-oriented programming using C++ and data structures in both national and international environments.
Jeanne M. Liedtka, is an American strategist and professor of business administration at the Darden School of the University of Virginia, particularly known for her work on strategic thinking, design thinking and organic growth.