Of all the disciplines in business, none is more fundamental or more elusive than strategy. Strategy is fundamental, as it sets the basic course of a business—how it will gain competitive advantage in the marketplace by meeting consumer needs better than competitors. But at the same time, strategy is not a fixed thing entity that is always clear; strategy is complex, interlocking ideas and theories that help a business add up to be more than the some of its individual functional parts (e.g., sales, marketing, finance, human resources).

This Senior Capstone Course will lay out the key principles of strategy, exploring its fundamental nature, the complexity that senior executives face in formulating it, and how it guides and is driven by other areas of the organization. Hopefully the course will provide a synthesis of many of the ideas you have worked on in other classes, and give you a glimpse of how senior executives think.