Why are some firms more successful than others? This is the fundamental question of strategy. As the business environment is becoming ever more complex, more turbulent, more global and more competitive, thinking strategically about how a firm should position itself in order to compete successfully is becoming increasingly critical. Those firms that will survive, grow, create and capture value are firms with a clear vision of what their competitive advantage is and of how to maintain and enhance it.

The perspective of this course is that of a general manager whose responsibility is to maximize the overall performance of the firm or the performance of a business unit within the firm. To achieve this objective, general managers must analyze the drivers of the firm’s current performance and identify external changes that may affect this performance. On this basis, their job is then to find ways to better leverage the firm’s internal resources in order to sustainably improve performance.

At the corporate level, general managers’ responsibility is also to define the scope of the firm’s activities, to implement strategic moves that will affect this scope, and convince shareholders and stakeholders of the relevance of their strategy. The objective of this course is to review the main concepts, methods and tools which are used in the strategy analysis, formulation and implementation processes, identify the business situations in which they can be applied most effectively, as well as understand the limitations of the various approaches.

GlobStrat Challenge is a comprehensive strategic management tool that enables participants to explore, understand, and handle the responsibilities of a corporate executive. Over an intense period of 2 days, participants work in teams and compete against other groups in a simulated market environment. In particular, GlobStrat focuses on the crucial stages of definition and implementation of a successful product-market and corporate strategy. Additionally, GlobStrat is based on triple-bottom line evaluation criteria (Profit, Planet, and People) allowing participants to explore the trade-offs behind sustainable strategic choices.

This module focuses on the psychological processes related to social and economic inequality. In the first part, we examine both the causes (such as cognitive biases and social interactions) and effects of inequality (such as mental states and cooperative behaviour). In the second part, we evaluate and co-create proposals to address various forms of inequality based on psychological models of human behaviour.