Strategy course — The art of Reverse engineering facts
Of the courses I did till date as part of my MBA, the course that I enjoyed the most is undoubtedly “Strategic Management”. Taught, as part of our term 3 at IIM Kozhikode, by two esteemed IIMA alumnus, the course followed, purely, a case pedagogy.
The course touched upon
- Competitive Strategy: How to build a sustainable competitive advantage?
- Corporate Strategy: Mergers, synergies, innovations & institutional voids
- Strategy implementation: How to use balanced scorecard
The concepts added immense value to me. However, they are not the key takeaways. And that is all what this article is about. I lay down the important takeaways from the course below
Questioning is just the beginning of analyzing a situation
Situation analysis is something that is asked and expected of managers. It is not easy. Many articles give you tips on how to do situation analysis. Most talk about asking recursive “why”s. And this is true. However, this is not the whole story. Questioning using “why”s is just the beginning. Answering those “why”s at every juncture requires far deeper understanding of the context which can only be developed by reading in depth perspectives about the business environment
A trip down the history lane and changing POVs are good starts
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But how to start answering the questions we pose? Where do we start? — Our professors had a method. Start with the history or change POV.
For every case we analyzed, we started with a brief history and arrived at the current situation step by step. In the process, we tried to debate and understand the implications of historical decisions which helped figure out root cause in many scenarios
Changing POV is another way to answer the questions. During the cases, we often changed the POV and analyzed the same situation from a different set of eyes other than the protagonist. This again helped us set the context to answer the “why”s that we posed.
While these two are not the only ways, I found that these two methods were a good start.
There is a high chance that somebody has created a framework to address your decision making dilemma. So find and read!
All the cases finally, always, lead to a business dilemma. What should the protagonist do? A situation, we as business mangers can expect. And the answer is frameworks. Post being introduced to Michael Porter, Clayton etc., prominent contributors to early strategy research, I found that the frameworks are ubiquitous. There is a high chance that one will certainly help structure the dilemma better.
The rich sources for these frameworks are business magazines such as HBR, MIT Sloan etc. I found that the frameworks, published as part of the articles, provided a good reasoning base and a structured way to come to a conclusion once the underlying problem is identified. So, one needs to regularly read these magazines to develop a knack for structured decision making
Finally, if I have to summarize the key takeaways from the course, I do it in 3 key points
- Asking “why” is a start and answering that why requires deeper contextual understanding
- One of the few best ways to develop contextual understanding is to either start from history or change the POV
- To effectively structure the decision making process, develop a knowledge base of frameworks through articles published in HBR, MIT Sloan etc.
