Special Topics: The Executive as Strategist

3 credits

The Executive as Strategist develops the strategic thinking capacities of senior practitioners leading organizations across corporate, public, and nonprofit sectors. Strategy is examined not as a planning exercise but as a discipline of consequential choice: where an organization will focus, what it will forgo, and how it will create value in a contested and uncertain environment. Drawing on foundational scholarship in competitive strategy, organizational capability, public value creation, stakeholder accountability, and strategy execution, the course asks students to engage these frameworks as lenses that sharpen strategic judgment. Students examine their own organizations with intellectual honesty, diagnose the conditions that produce strategic clarity or strategic drift, and develop the habits of strategic thinking that sustain executive effectiveness over time.