Global Business Strategy

Price: $299
Modality: Self-Paced, Online
Time Required: Approximately 30 hours

Overview

This course on Global Business Strategy is divided into two parts, one which focuses on business strategy and one which focuses on global strategy. The core premise is that if there are serious weaknesses in a company's business strategy, then no degree of sophistication regarding global strategy can save the company. Thus, the design of a company's global strategy depends hugely on the key elements and soundness of its business strategy.

Learning Objectives

Assess your business strategy including the fundamental sources of your competitive advantage.
Explore and examine potential Blue Ocean opportunities within your industry.
Assess the strength (or weakness) of your company’s competitive advantage along both dimensions: onstage (i.e., in the eyes of customers on criteria that matter to them) and backstage (i.e., in terms of your resources and capabilities).
Develop a game plan to strengthen your company’s competitive advantages along both onstage and backstage.
Explain the global economic structure of your industry - especially whether the odds favor local players or global players, how much, and why.
Develop a strategy for the globalization of your company's market presence.
Design a strategy for the global optimization of your company's value chain.

Course Map

Course Map that is a globe with five boxes coming out of the right side of the globe; each box includes a name of a module.

The first part of this course, focusing on business strategy, aims to give you the tools, frameworks, and ideas necessary to develop business strategies for your own organization. Some key topics we’ll cover in this part of the course include: key elements of business strategy, how to make decisions about the scope of your business, how you may be able to discover blue ocean opportunities, how you can win red ocean battles by building and sustaining competitive advantage over time.

The second part of this course focuses on how to expand your business globally and succeed. A central idea here is that globalization is a double-edged sword. It can bring several benefits such as faster growth, bigger scale, and the ability to serve global customers with distributed needs worldwide. On the other hand, globalization also exposes the firm to unfamiliar challenges, greater complexity, and higher fixed costs. Thus, unless the benefits exceed the costs, globalization will backfire.

Some key topics we'll cover in this part of the course include: what differentiates a "globally integrated" from a "multi-domestic" industry and why it matters, how to build a strategy for global market expansion, how to decide whether to go alone or partner, how to decide how much to adapt to local market peculiarities, how to globally optimize various activities in the business's value chain, how to groom local and global leaders, how to cultivate a global mindset.

Modules

Module 1: Conceptual Foundations

In this module, we will explore how narrowly or broadly a company should define the scope of its business. We will also discuss the difference between onstage and backstage competitive advantage.

Module 2: Creating Onstage Advantage

Module 2 will go deeper into the concepts involved in creating onstage advantage. We'll learn the difference between Blue Ocean and Red Ocean opportunities.

Module 3: Creating Backstage Advantage

Module 3 will cover the concept of "Value Chain" and how companies can design and manage the value chain to create backstage advantage.

Module 4: The Global Context

Module 4 will cover the topic of globalization and some of the challenges associated with going global. We will explore what those challenges may be and why we call globalization a double-edged sword.

Module 5: Designing a Global Strategy

In the final Module, we will focus on how to design the company's global strategy. There are two parts to global strategy: (a) Globalization of Market Presence, and (b) Global Optimization of the Value Chain.