 you on these study sessions over the next several weeks and I want to talk a little bit about the structure of the course first and then we'll dig in a little bit and talk about the types of things that you've been learning as you've been going through the course. So the first thing in terms of course structure that I'd like us to talk a little bit about is the course learning objectives. So there'll be course learning objectives and then there will be unit learning objectives as well. So our course learning objectives these are the things that once you're finished with the course you should know and and be able to do. So let's talk a little bit about those. The first is the ability to define what strategy is and really define all of the participants within a strategic process and also be able to analyze the various types of industry structures that that you may be developing strategy for. Our second learning objective is being able to apply strategic management tools and look at external and internal factors that could affect the strategy of of your organization. Our third is the ability to define competitive advantage and being able to really determine what your organization's competitive advantages are and best practices for maintaining those competitive advantages as well. Then we'll also be talking about a variety of corporate strategies and how those strategies are applied and how ultimately they're developed over time. And then we'll also be talking about various techniques for strategic management. Of course technology has changed just about everything and it changes very rapidly. So we'll be discussing how you can really leverage technology in order to implement your strategy and how you can utilize technology to do a lot of the assessment that you may want to do around the strategy such as metrics and so forth to figure out if your strategy is working. And then finally we'll be able to synthesize strategic management theory and a variety of concepts to help explain competitive advantage, but particularly in the area of globalization. So those are our overall learning objectives and again once you're finished with the course you should be able to do all of these things. So today and next time we'll be talking about the unit learning objectives for unit one. So let's take a look at those together as well. So in this first unit we'll be talking, we'll be able to define strategy and define it in its many, many forms. We'll also be talking about the participants within a strategy and analyze market structures. So this course is designed so you're really going to look at the big picture and then we're going to funnel it down into specific strategies you might want to to implement. So these are the unit learning outcomes but I want to talk a little bit about why they are so important. I know a lot of students will tend to just skip over that part of a course but everything in the course is based upon those learning objectives. So when you go to take your exam, know that every single question you'll be answering somehow ties back to these learning objectives. So my recommendation to you is to always check the learning objectives before you start any unit and once you're finished with the unit go back and make sure that you have the knowledge that you may need to to be able to apply those learning objectives. That helps with the learning of course but it'll also help you as you get ready for for the exam. Mike everything good on your end? Yeah is that better? Right so the last thing I want to talk about before we we dig into some of this material is the overall course layout and what you'll be learning in each of the five units that we have in this course. Unit one as we kind of already alluded to we're going to be looking at an introduction to strategy we'll be looking at some definitions related to strategy and really give you that background to be able to to take that deep dive into strategy and how you implement a strategy for an organization. In unit two we'll talk about the planning process for strategic planning and the types of things that you may want to look at as you determine the best way for your organization to to move forward and really leverage competitive advantage within your industry. And then we'll jump into unit three which is all about creating a competitive advantage and we'll be talking about different strategies that companies will implement, different analysis that they can do in order to determine what their competitive advantage is and how they can best leverage that as a part of their strategy. I will then talk about corporate strategy and some of the theories surrounding that in strategy and how you go about selecting the right strategy for your organization. We'll also talk about implementation as well and how you implement implement a strategy. And then finally we'll be talking in unit five about some of the special challenges with technology and with global globalization that you will want to concern yourself with as you not only implement that strategy but you measure it to to see if it's working because of course as you know there are a lot of factors that can impact the strategy of an organization so in that last unit we'll take a look at okay what what types of things really do you need to consider in order to make sure the strategy is effective. At this point do we have any questions about the course structure or the layout or anything like that that I can help you with? Absolutely and I'll I'll be checking in with you throughout these sessions to see if you have questions so feel free to I'm not sure Mike is our students able to put it in the chat or don't hesitate to jump in there and ask if you if you have something. So let's let's go ahead and dig into unit one and as you know this will be over two live sessions so the topics that we're going to cover and you'll notice that these are related back to the learning objectives that we talked about so we're going to go over some definitions for strategic management which will really provide a basis for us to be able to understand the the rest of the units. We're also going to talk a little bit about the different types of market structures and why that's important to strategy we'll talk about the hierarchy of strategy how you may want to look at pricing objectives as you're going about your strategy and analysis is a very important aspect to developing your strategy you need to understand what is going on in the world around you those internal and external factors that could have an impact on on your business and your strategy so we'll be talking about some of those as well in this unit and then one of the most popular models for strategy and strategy development is a model developed by Porter and Porter at Michael Porter actually has several models the one that we'll be looking at in this unit digs really deep into some of those external forces that you may want to consider as you develop your strategy so I will be I will be looking at that in this unit as well so let's take a let's take a look at some of the definitions that that are that are important for us to consider so when you look at a business model a business model is is really the way an organization does business and goes about their business and many organizations have a lot of efficiencies or they can gain a lot of efficiencies for example maybe they are able to produce something for the lowest cost or maybe they have excellent customer service this ties to value propositions in the value propositions are focused on what you're providing to your customer what what element is makes your product or your service different from everybody else so before we look at even developing a strategy in a business we want to know what our value proposition is going to be strategies this is the big picture the the overall direction that you're going to go within your organization so think about and we'll talk about this a little bit later but your mission statement and your vision statement these are the the overarching factors that are going to drive every decision you make in your business so a strategy is very similar to that in that your strategy you may have a lot of tactical plans but your strategy is ultimately going to drive everything that you do within your organization and then the strategic portfolio are the number of products or services or elements that you have as part of your as part of your overall strategy so we'll be we'll be looking at all of these in a lot more detail I just thought it was important at this point to talk about these from the from the big picture perspective so we'll also be looking at market structures and market structure is the way a market within within a country is is ultimately structured and the the type of market that it actually is so we'll be defining each of these but when you think about strategy and you think about developing your strategy it's really important to understand this because you may select one strategy over another depending on the type of market that that you're ultimately ultimately operating in and again we'll define excuse me we'll define each of these in in a few minutes but what I what I really want you to take out of it is that a lot goes into strategy so it's not just oh well we think we want to move forward with this or we want to do this particular thing there's a lot of different factors and a lot of different contexts that you need to consider as as you're developing your strategy and ultimately doing that analysis so let's take a look at another element that's important in terms of of really looking at your organization and determining the strategic direction that you want to go and so we can call these strategic contexts and these are the factors that an organization must operate within so let's talk about each of them in turn the first are economic factors and economic can be anything from the value of currency in a particular country to the to the politics of a particular country anything that could impact laws that type of thing the the direction that you go for for your strategy is really important to consider and so economic factors of course would be an external factor and external factors of course are those things that we don't have any control over we just need to deal with them in the greater context as we're as we're creating our strategy and then there are also societal factors and these are important as well because we need to understand what is happening in the world around us in order to be able to effectively make strategic decisions so for example a societal fact factor might be things like coven which we've all recently just experienced this is something that happens that is important and it may change the way that we need to do business as it has for many businesses already so part of that is looking at our own strengths and weaknesses as an organization and there are a number of tools that we will be taking a look at throughout throughout this course to really analyze our strengths and weaknesses and also will want to understand our industry very well and what opportunities and what threats could impact our organization and then we also want to look at as a part of societal factors the values of our organization what do we think is important what what do we want to be in the grander scheme of things as an organization and then also understanding knowing what we want to be but also understanding societal expectations of us as an organization is important too because of course we want to meet the needs of society we want to be socially responsible we want to do all of the things that our customers ultimately expect not only because it's the right thing to do but because that can drive customers to us if they believe that we're doing the right thing and really following these these broader societal expectations that they have for us so again we're looking at the big picture here and there are a couple of things that you want to consider the first is what is this current situation so you could do this as we already talked about by analysis of strengths and weaknesses of your organization and also of the industry so it's really taking a deep look into what types of things are happening in society what things are happening economically what are the strengths of our organization so when we take this step back and we're able to look at and do a situation analysis we're able to better prepare ourselves and understand the strategic direction that we should be going once we understand that we will then set our targets so this will be goals and objectives and usually with strategy we'll have some really big goals and objectives and then we'll make tactical plans that can help us meet those goals and objectives we'll talk about that a little bit later on in the course but for now just know that that is ultimately our second step here as we look at strategic management next we'll want to figure out the path how are we going to get there how we have this strategy developed what kind of plans do we need to put into place do we need how much money do we need to do it how many how many human resources are available for us to to do that one thing that I would add here is the ability to is the ability to then go back and measure so it's great to have goals and objectives all organizations should have those but a lot of times they don't take the step back and measure the progress toward those goals and objectives so I would say that if you think of strategic planning as a circular process and one that you know if not there's no end point you you must circle back and say okay yes that's working so we're going to continue those tactical plans but you'll want to take the step back and say oh gosh well that that particular aspect isn't working how do we need to change our our planning or our route because it what we chose what isn't working so so that's basically an overview of of the strategic strategic planning process and one thing that I want us to take a look at is when we look at evaluating this strategy and so we've done all of this work we've analyzed internal and external strengths now we want to put that strategy together map our path as we just discussed but then we want to take that step back and say okay what what elements maybe are missing what elements have we done well and we could do this by looking at these these three main factors and the first factor is suitability the plan that we have doesn't make economic sense so I mean that in terms of the ability to earn profit on the strategy but also understanding the the the aspects of that that bigger picture like we've talked about doesn't make sense doesn't make sense within our industry for example the second thing that we want to consider after we've developed our strategy is the feasibility oftentimes organizations will have these very grand plans but they don't have maybe the financial resources to to put in and ultimately make that a reality but you know of course financial resources that's kind of a given but we also want to make sure that we have the right people too in order to implement that strategy so you may need more people you may need people with different skills so not just the number of people but the the the right skills set in order to be able to implement and of course time is a big one too in terms of feasibility do you have the time to be able to implement this strategy and do your people have the time to be able to help you implement the strategy and then finally acceptability is the idea that is how much risk are you taking within this strategy and is that okay is your organization going to be okay taking that amount of risk and of course we always want to be concerned about our stakeholders and how our stakeholders feel about our strategy a stakeholder is ultimately anyone that cares about the success of a business it's different from stockholder so that's an important thing to note so a stakeholder will look at or when we're looking and evaluating our stakeholders it could be our suppliers our employees our customers people in the community that we operate with them so really considering the stakeholders and how they're going to feel about the strategic decisions that we're making is is really important how are we doing on questions any questions is this uh too small to see perfect thank you so when we look at when we look at strategy there's this idea of strategic hierarchies and ultimately that means it's the relationship of a strategy to within an individual department say to the overall organizational strategy so where many organizations make a mistake is each individual department or each individual area of the business may have a particular strategy of their own which may not tie into the overall organizational strategy so as leaders in our organization we want to make sure that everything ultimately is is tied together so let's take a look at this and we'll start with the with the blue part there and that's the global strategy so your global strategy is going to tie it to the vision of your organization the mission of your organization and then from those we come up with objectives so these big overall overarching organizational objectives and then remember we talked a little bit ago about metrics and that's the ability to measure whether or not that strategy was successful or not so you'll notice on all of these that are listed metrics is an important part because you always need to go back and make sure that you measure things and that allows you to make changes to your strategy as you go along if you know whether or not it's working so when we look at the next line there the marketing strategy the same thing so your marketing strategy needs to ultimately tie to your global strategy again for your marketing strategy you have a vision a mission objectives and metrics organizations also need to have a financial strategy you know implementing different strategies can be very expensive especially if it involves a say production of a new product or service so the financial strategy you need to make sure you have the money to be able to implement implement that global strategy that that you've ultimately set forth also tied to that is your human resources strategy and again you'll see the same vision mission objectives for that strategy which ultimately ties to your global strategy so you'll want to make sure that you have the right people you have enough people you have people with the right skill set in order to help you meet that overall global strategy perfect sorry about that and i can mic i'll send this to you once we're once we're finished this morning perfect and then in terms of strategy we have our information strategy how are we going to deal with cyber security in our organization again this should be tied to the overall global strategy and then we have if we're producing products and I know I will refer to products a lot but keep in mind it could be a service too that where you're developing a strategy for a service that that an organization offers so you'll have a strategy around your around your supply chain materials how are you going to get the raw materials that you need again that ties ultimately into the global global strategy and then finally the last one on the bottom is the organizational development strategy and this ultimately looks at the the the growth of your organization and how you're going to manage that growth in the big picture of of the strategic organization and I'm it could also mean things like how your organization is going to handle changes that happen within the organization but also within the industry as well so we talked we talked earlier about market structures and how a market structure is an important input into the decisions that you're going to make in terms of your strategy so we have four main different types of market structures and this can change over time depending on the industry that you happen to be in so when you look at peer competition peer competition is ultimately defined as a product that's pretty similar so in other words if you go purchase bread at the store for example it's pretty much going to be the same product throughout no matter anywhere you go in the world so when you compete within that market space that would be considered peer competition there are a lot of sellers the products are very similar and it's fairly easy for organizations to be able to enter into that market in other words it's not that expensive to to enter so moving from the most the most competitive to the least competitive industries we have imperfect or monopolistic competition and i want to point out here because i know it can be confusing this is different from monopoly which is on the far right of this of this chart so monopolistic is different from monopoly and in this type of market structure there are a lot of sellers similar with peer competition but the products are differentiated and it's important to note with differentiated products this could be real or perceived so the products may not be that different but through marketing for example they may have done a really good job making their product different at least in the customer's mind and then also with a monopolistic competition this is a fair it's a fairly easy market to get into our third and again becoming less competitive is as we go along the spectrum here in an oligopoly we have very few sellers so it might be something that is very expensive for example to to enter into the market and the products can also be identical or differentiated the important thing to remember about this specific market structure is that is that that it is more difficult to enter the market so it might be um i don't know uh oil selling oil you know it's it would be very expensive if um all of us wanted to start our own oil company so this is really what makes it different from peer competition or monopolistic competition is that expense it's not easy just to you would need millions if not billions of us dollars in order to to make that happen and then um finally the um the you're probably familiar with the idea of a monopoly and with a monopoly there's only one seller and um there aren't a lot of close substitutes and the best example I can give here would be um a power company for example a power company is usually if you want electricity to your home there's one organization that provides it and you really don't have any other options as a customer so um this is uh um this is a different type of market and what I want to point out and the reason why we're talking about this is the idea that you have to know what kind of market you're competing in in order to ultimately develop your strategy uh your strategy is going to be very different if you're in pure uh purely competitive market uh versus a monopoly so this is part of the inputs that we talked about um a little bit earlier today in that in order to understand what your strategic directions should be you need to understand the external forces and the external aspects that um that may may affect your organization and your overall strategy so just as a note here um you need to know how you're competing before you can actually compete so this gives an element of understanding in terms of you know okay we're in a monopolistic industry and environment your strategy will be totally different as as we talked about are we good on questions so we talked a little bit at the beginning about uh about price and understanding pricing structures in turn in the context of an overall strategy so I want us to look and we'll dig a lot deeper into this a little bit later in the course but um when when you're looking at making pricing decisions within your organization this is ultimately the framework that you'll want to use and of course price could be one of the most important things as part of your strategy because it's going to determine how you differentiate yourself as an organization offering a particular product or service so uh when we look at pricing the first thing that we'll do is set those pricing objectives what are our goals um and these could be things like um we want to make x amount of money for every item that we sell or we may want to target a certain profit margin for example so um understanding those objectives first will help us develop our pricing strategy and our pricing framework and the next thing that we'll do is estimate the demand of course we'll want to do research on our customers and understand what the demand is for for our particular product or service and then another input into this is to determine what our costs are what is our cost to produce a particular product or service because of course we want to be able to earn money for each of those products or services that we sell so we need to know the ultimately the cost that that goes into production of each of those we want to also look at the factors that affect pricing decisions so this could be things like scarcity it could be demand it could be um current market conditions a lot of those internal and external factors that we looked at a little bit earlier today uh will affect ultimately our pricing decisions then we'll want to look at our um pricing strategies and our policies for making price adjustments on our product or our service and we'll look a little bit deeper at the different pricing strategies that you can leverage here here in a little bit so organizations once they put all of these factors together they then set their initial price for their product or for their service and um an important thing to remember about any type of strategy whether it's overall strategy or pricing strategies or marketing strategies or um financial strategies is that you want to be able to go back and make adjustments so it's not with any type of strategic direction including pricing you don't want to just say okay we set the price we're good to go you really want to monitor that and see see what changes and adjustments that you may need to make to price and to your pricing strategy and that's through metrics which we which we looked at a little bit earlier as well so uh digging a little bit deeper here into into price there are a few objectives that that we may want to set when we're pricing our product or service the first is um ROI which stands for return on investment so we may target a particular percentage for example that we want to earn 50% ROI on every product that we sell so these are usually quantitative in nature um meaning that um it's it's it's numbers driven um many organizations will have a pricing strategy to maximize their profits or maximize sales they may want to maximize their market share and a market share is the amount of customers that buy a particular category of product the ones that buy your product so we of course a higher market share is better because that means that you're selling more so many organizations will use an objective of gaining more market share or we could say gaining more traction where customers that are interested in buying that particular product are buying your product some organizations will also use a status quo pricing strategy which is they follow what what other competitors do and they tend to match that same price uh think about airlines for example if you're if you go online to buy a plane ticket you'll find most competitors flying a particular route um are right within the same price range so another thing that's really important to note here is that most organizations when they're setting pricing objectives they don't leverage just one of these they will probably have a mix of objectives and goals related to related to each of these so as we've alluded to a little bit already pricing decisions are made based on things like your customers what they demand how much they're willing to pay for something your competitors what are they pricing similar products and services at of course depending on the country where you live the economy the laws the regulations on pricing is going to impact those strategic pricing decisions and then of course the costs of production so when you think about producing a product shipping a product all of these types of things are going to ultimately go into making that pricing decision we can look also at fixed cost and these are the costs that we're going to have no matter how many products we sell so a fixed cost might be a a building or equipment that we purchase so whether we sell two items or 200 we have that cost of that building no matter what um variable costs as as the names suggest are really focused in the the it's going to go up that number is going to go up depending on how many you sell so variable costs might include the the marketing in in your organization it might include customer service representatives the amount that you need to service those customers so variable as a name suggests changes over time depending on how many you sell whereas fixed costs are costs that you have no matter what and all of these things of course are very important because when we look at making our pricing decisions that it really goes hand in hand with our overall organizational strategy and when we talked earlier about the strategic hierarchy everything has to tie together in order for for it to be successful so really looking at how we make decisions on pricing and making sure that that ties into our overall strategy is is really key so one last thing here I'd like us to talk about on on pricing is some specific pricing strategies and the and I see that I have a typo on my slide so I apologize for that that should say skimming that first one I wonder if I could change that real quick well I don't want to mess with anything okay okay sorry about that I did spell check but you know it doesn't catch something that's uh spelled right so I'll correct that when when I send these out so as a skim pricing or skimming pricing is uh occurs when an organization sets a price really high at first and then they gradually lower it over time so think about technology products this happens a lot because companies will spend a lot of money and research and development for a particular product and they want to capture the most return on investment upfront for those customers who are willing to pay that really high price for for a new technology a penetration pricing is kind of the opposite of skim pricing in that penetration sets the price low at first and then it will gradually raise over time companies might use this type of strategy in a situation where maybe it's a new type of product and customers aren't comfortable with it yet but maybe they're willing to try it at a lower price so again skim pricing penetration pricing are almost exact opposite and you may use one strategy over another depending on as we've talked about all of the external and internal factors within within the organization many companies also use cost plus pricing which focuses on what it costs to produce a particular product or service so they'll look at all of the variable and fixed expenses in the organization and then ultimately set the price based on a target like we want to earn 50 revenue off of each product we sell for example a prestige pricing just like it sounds is all about image and if you think of a very expensive name brand handbag a very expensive car these items tend to be priced using a prestige pricing strategy because the the organization knows that people are willing to pay top dollar to have that name on that handbag or that name on the hood of that of that vehicle so prestige pricing it before an organization goes with this strategy they already have to have that really positive image and that expensive image about their brand before they can price as such captive pricing is a pricing strategy where people are willing to pay more because they maybe have no choice in a particular situation so if you're at a concert for example and you want to purchase food there it's probably going to be a lot more expensive than if you were to purchase food outside of the stadium so we call this captive pricing because the people have no choice but to buy whatever it is that you're offering at at a certain price one thing that I'd like you to think about before we before we meet again is the different situations where organizations might use different strategies in terms of pricing and I'd like you to think about products that and services that you purchase and organizations that you do business with and as you go throughout your week before before we meet again I really like you to try to identify when you're purchasing something what type of strategy do you think they're using in terms of pricing and we can talk a little bit more about that next week and next week we'll also talk and take an even deeper dive into how organizations actually formulate their strategy and the things that you'll want to consider as you as you begin to formulate an organizational strategy at this time are there are there questions or are we all good Mike that's correct yes we'll finish unit one next week thank you everybody bye everybody thank you