Strategic Management [antikvár]

This book is written primarily for students in Masters level courses in strategic management and business policy, and can be used by students in advanced undergraduate programs as well. These courses and the field have been undergoing a transition in recent years. The traditional policy course and associated text/casebooks dealt almost exclusively with the course objectives called for by the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). These objec- tives require that the course be an interdisciplinary and integrative capstone course with a general management perspective. That is, it should take an organizationwide view that is not limited to any one functional point of view. Thus, the charter of the policy field is to focus on the critical issues of central interest to the top managements of organizations, both operational and strategic. The viewpoint taken in this text agrees with that of Paul Cook and Joseph Bower of Harvard, that the policy field includes "all the messy, unsolved, and perhaps undefined problems" characterizing the man- agement of an organization. As soon as such problems are sufficiently well understood, they can be incorporated as part of the subject matter in one of the functional disciplines. In the past 10 to 15 years, a body of knowledge has developed that deals with strategic management—a critical function of the firm and an area of primary importance to organizations of all types. As a result, most "policy" books today attempt to deal with "strategy," with varying degrees of success. Many policy faculty find themselves teach- ing a "minicourse" dealing with strategic management concepts, de- voting the remainder (or case portion) of the course to the traditional capstone, integrative, "business policy" objectives.