Strategy

Fall

• How to Become an Expert: Practicum
  This Practicum is the logical progression of EXPRT. It picks up where EXPRT left off. The final assignment of EXPRT asked students to reason about how they would apply the insights they learned in the course--especially the concept of deliberate practice and the model of learning we derived from it--to their professional domain of choice. In particular, the assignment required them to elaborate a concrete “plan of action.” The Practicum brings them one step closer to practice by asking students to apply a version of their plan of action to their internship jobs. Upon their return to Tuck, students will get individualized feedback, share their experiences, make sense of them, and derive general patterns that cut across them. The main goal of this course is to help students deepen their understanding of how they can achieve excellence in their professional domain. There are three ways in which the course helps students accomplish this goal. First, it helps them develop a more nuanced understanding of what deliberate practice means in their professional context. While this is a central topic of EXPRT, moving from reasoning about the concrete implications of deliberate practice to actually applying it will reveal challenges and opportunities that would be hard to foresee otherwise. Second, the application effort, properly guided, helps sharpen students’ understanding of the components of deliberate practice and the relationships among them. Third and most importantly, it helps students deepen their internalization of the modus operandi associated with deliberate practice, ideally to the point where it becomes second nature in guiding their pursuit of excellence going forward.
• Strategy
  This course offers the “essential” tool-kit of the executive involved in the strategy process—the key ideas, concepts, and tools that are necessary to properly exercise strategic leadership. The course is divided into two parts. The first focuses on the strategy problem at the business unit level. It is at the business unit level that many key strategic choices and actions are formulated and undertaken. This part of the course starts by proposing a vocabulary and an analytical structure that help define competitive advantage precisely. It then tackles the question of how a strategic leader can locate opportunities to achieve sustained competitive advantage. This part of the course concludes with a discussion of why strategic leaders should be not only competent “practitioner economists”––the ability to read market forces is the traditional focus of competitive strategy analysis and tools––but also competent “practitioner psychologists,” and what developing such competence entails. The second part of the course focuses on the challenge of managing multiple business units. In particular, it focuses on how a strategic leader can determine the ideal horizontal and vertical scope for her firm and what that implies for mergers, acquisitions, and various typologies of alliances.
• Ecosystem Strategy
  Over the past 20 years, the notion of business “ecosystems” has become pervasive in discussions of strategy, both scholarly and applied. Its rise has mirrored an increasing interest and concern with interdependence across organizations and activities. In this course we will develop a perspective on the challenges of innovation and competition with a particular focus on the context of ecosystems – settings where value creation depends on aligning multiple parties in novel ways. How should we approach the challenge of picking the right opportunity, aligning the right partners, and targeting the right market and, perhaps most importantly, setting the right expectations for a new venture? How should an ecosystem context affect competitive strategy, both offense and defense? What new management challenges arise when value creation and capture no longer depend just on satisfying customers and beating rivals, but also on our ability to identify, align, and maintain critical partners and partnerships? We will explore these questions using a set of analytic lenses that will help us assess the potential of new opportunities and to strategize about how to best exploit them. We will apply these tools using a combination of cases, exercises, and reflection essays.

Winter

• Leading Disruptive Change
  Leading Disruptive Change describes a set of lenses, tools, and mindsets to navigate through today’s world of predictable unpredictability. Technologies are advancing exponentially, lines between industries are blurring, expectations of consumers, employees, and stakeholders are shifting, and global shocks are happening with increased frequency. The forever normal of constant change places leaders in a thick fog. Data to justify making a decision comes in when it is too late to make a decision. Yesterday’s strengths become tomorrow’s weaknesses. In the fog, leaders must confront adaptive issues that are complicated, interdependent, and require multidisciplinary approaches. Conflicting demands feel paralyzing. Pursue purpose by embracing sustainability and maximize profits by extracting and exploiting resources. Protect the present and create the future. Enable empowerment and autonomy and decisively lead in new directions. Build a high-performance meritocracy and provide equitable opportunities and outcomes. Resting at the unique intersection of the disciplines of strategy, innovation, leadership, behavioral psychology, and systems psychodynamics, Leading Disruptive Change integrates academic research and practitioner-oriented tools and frameworks to give students practical ways to act wisely and decisively through the fog of disruptive change. We will go through seven core tenets: 1. You need to lead through fog 2. You need to understand the particular nature of adaptive challenges 3. Technical solutions are necessary but not sufficient to solve adaptive challenges 4. Solving adaptive challenges requires intentionally inducing and managing discomfort. 5. Go deep to find the real problem. 6. Both/and it with a paradox mindset. 7. Follow paradoxical practices to lead disruptive change.
• Strategy in Innovation Ecosystems
  Entrepreneurship and Innovation Strategy (EIS) or Ecosystem Strategy (ES) is a prerequisite for this RTP. No exceptions. In this seminar we will continue to develop the theme of ecosystems that we covered in ES, and explore whether and how strategy making needs to change when value creation requires multiple participants to interact. The course itself will be an exercise in joint value creation (with all the risks that that entails). The session formats will vary. Some sessions will be devoted to discussing academic articles. Others will focus on deep-dive analyses of selected topics and contexts. Depending on student interest and speaker availability, we may also engage with external visitors (think of these more as interviews than presentations). A subset of topics to be covered includes: • Changes in industry structure • Changes in the competitive landscape • Approaches to technological change • Managing internal and external collaborations • Implications for corporate leadership The course structure is subject to real time adaptation and will respond to opportunities and interests that arise. Student deep dive projects will be the focus of the closing session.

Spring

• How to Become an Expert: Theory, Practice and Reflection
  This course leverages insights from the modern science of expertise to explore how individuals striving for excellence can develop world-class expertise and attain mastery in their chosen profession. The modern science of expertise has uncovered compelling evidence indicating that consistently high-performing individuals approach their professional growth in remarkably similar ways across various fields. Whether you're a musician, lawyer, doctor, or chess player, achieving mastery often involves adhering to disciplined practices with well-defined characteristics. This research tradition, originating decades ago with studies of chess masters by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, has evolved into a contemporary body of work spearheaded by Simon's student Anders Ericsson. This research emphasizes the significance of "deliberate practice," challenging the conventional wisdom of the 10,000-hour rule and highlighting the strategic nature of practice efforts. It posits that what truly sets masters apart from average performers is not the sheer amount of time spent practicing (though extensive practice is essential for success) but rather how they direct their practice efforts. This course does not aim to offer only theoretical knowledge on achieving mastery. Its objective is to influence students’ practice and learning habits in their professional endeavors. Altering habits, routines, or approaches requires a non-standard pedagogy, one that enables students to firsthand experience what the recommended shift in habit involves and why. Thus, the course is designed around experiential, action-based learning. This methodology involves initial engagement in concrete experiences, followed by reflection and the extraction of general concepts or principles, supplemented by relevant theoretical material. By the course's conclusion, students will have developed a concrete "plan of action" outlining how to approach their expertise development in their chosen professional domain. Note that first-year students who take How to Become an Expert: Theory, Practice, and Reflection will also have the opportunity to enroll in the companion Practicum, How to Become an Expert: Practicum, offered during the summer and limited to 15 students. The final assignment in EXPRT is the development of a concrete plan of action. The Practicum takes students one step closer to practice by asking them to unpack this plan within the context of their internship. Throughout the internship, students receive individualized mentorship in two key ways. First, they have ongoing access to Professor Gavetti for feedback on any challenges they encounter or questions they may have. Second, they benefit from one-on-one guidance provided by a domain expert—a Tuck alumnus from the graduating classes of 2014 to 2016 who has achieved exceptional success in the same professional field as the student’s internship. Upon returning to Tuck, students engage in structured reflection: they share experiences, receive tailored feedback, and work to extract general patterns that cut across different individual journeys. The goal is to help them deepen their understanding of how to pursue and sustain excellence in their chosen professional domain. The Practicum supports this goal in three main ways: 1) It helps students develop a more nuanced understanding of what deliberate practice means in their professional context. While this is a core theme in EXPRT, actually applying it in a real-world setting surfaces challenges and opportunities that theory alone cannot fully reveal. 2) It sharpens their understanding of the components of deliberate practice and how these elements interact—through guided application in a live setting. 3) Most importantly, it fosters the internalization of a deliberate practice mindset—ideally to the point where it becomes second nature, shaping how students approach their pursuit of excellence long after the course ends.
• Startup Strategizing
  Startup success is elusive—most fail despite optimistic beginnings. Why, and what can you do about it? This course argues that success depends not just on spotting a great market opportunity but on developing an insightful strategy — a theory that identifies and solves a Problem of Value (PoV). The PoV is the pivotal challenge that, when effectively addressed, unlocks the full potential of a market opportunity. Startup strategy is difficult because PoVs often lie hidden in value chains, technologies, activity systems, and cost structures. While tools like pitch decks, business plans, experimentation, and pivoting toward product-market fit are essential, they are complements—not substitutes—for a well-founded strategy. Whether you are a founder, early-stage employee, investor, or executive navigating disruption, the PoV framework, grounded in cutting-edge strategy research, provides the tools to craft winning strategies, defy the odds, and achieve lasting success.
• Implementing Strategy
  The central focus of this minicourse is strategy implementation. The importance of the subject matter covered in this course is captured in the widely accepted “truism” that over 90 percent of businesses founder on the rocks of implementation. However laudable strategic intentions may be, if they do not become a reality, they usually are not worth the paper on which they are written. Conversely, high-performing companies excel at execution. This course is about “contemporary execution models”: How to innovate in areas such as organization structure, incentive systems, decision-making autonomy, talent acquisition, and so on. We’ll especially focus on the management models that are pre-requisite for success in the digital era.
• International Strategy
  International strategy shares many of the same principles and practices as corporate strategy. But we need to recognize that there are fundamental points of divergence. When a company’s activities and interests’ cross national borders, disruption, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and diversity (D-VUCAD) increase exponentially. Managers and leaders can struggle to make balanced and informed strategic choices as they encounter new stakeholders and multifarious issues and influences. As companies internationalize, management encounter factors that introduce new strategic tradeoffs and fresh strategic choices. The three overarching factors[1] are heterogeneity across markets (countries are fundamentally different), the scale and complexity of global operations (you need to comprehend and manage a lot more), and the unpredictability of economic and political conditions between countries (the volatility of geopolitics and exogenous global events). Each factor has profound implications, both for the type of competitive advantage or scope economy that justifies geographical expansion, and for critical decisions concerning how the company is configured and positioned to compete internationally. The crux of this elective is to understand how to proactively develop and deliver foreign market entry strategies that effectively anticipate and respond to these overarching influences.
• Strategic Leadership
  This minicourse focuses on senior executives and how they choose to run their organizations. That means the good stuff they do, and the not so good. How CEOs, boards, and other top managers make decisions, guide strategy, and even get their jobs in the first place are all core topics in the minicourse. Course topics include: executive selection and succession, executive leadership, top management team composition and dynamics, and board-management relations. Though the course will be helpful for students who wish to strengthen their managerial talents, it is more focused on improving students’ ability to diagnose, critically evaluate, and enhance executive capabilities in organizations.