Global Strategy looks at the strategic challenge when companies and institutions go beyond their natural borders.
Globalization & Strategy, was a course taught in the fifth term of the full time MBA program is a 20 session course that focuses on the strategic issues that arise when firms do business outside or their home market or markets. The course explored the strategic tools that could be used to do this and also explored additional topics such as the impact on business of geopolitics, sustainability and technological change. The course started with the ideas embedded in the lecture Doing Business on the Planet and is roughly divided into three parts:
- The first part deals with a few of the issues facing businesses around the world such as child labor, global health concerns, and energy.
- The second, main part of the course, goes through Pankaj Ghemawat’s AAA framework developed in Redefining Global Strategy with case studies from a variety of industries to illustrate the three strategies of Adaptation, Aggregation, and Arbitrage in some depth.
- The course then proceeds to look at sustainability and its impact on global strategy and introduces scenario planning as a powerful tool with which to investigate the future.
Global Strategy is a 6 session course taught in the Global Executive MBA (both monthly and bi-monthly format) and builds on the courses on competitive and corporate strategy in the program. The course focuses on the strategic issues that arise when firms operate across national borders.The residential modules of the course consists of interactive lectures and case study discussions. The distributed learning part of the course is built around the development of student selected wiki’s which revolve around different challenges facing businesses engaged in global expansion such as the world’s energy future, the emergence of mega-cities, the rise of Mongolia, etc.
Global Strategy also forms part of the curriculum in many custom Programs and deals with the many of the same issues. For these programs, the subject usually covers one half or one full day and includes an introduction to the topic, one or two case studies, and a workshop revolving around the specific global challenges facing the company whose executives are attending the program.