Chapter outline
Strategic Management Dynamics is primarily designed as a textbook for introductory courses in
strategic management. However, it can be used – in whole or in part – in other types of course,
as well as for independent study.
The basic appreciation of how firms and organizations function covered in the early chapters can
support foundation courses in business and management, designed to give students a clear context
for understanding how functional courses relate to each other. Elsewhere in MBA and similar programs,
the book provides powerful, rigorous frameworks applicable to classes in functional or topic-oriented
classes, such as marketing and sales, human resource management, product development, operations
management, entrepreneurship and innovation.
Its rigorous, integrated perspective on how the major functions and departments of an organization
work together over time also provide a useful basis for a business management and strategy course
within specialist Masters’ and professional courses in such subjects as Finance, Marketing, Accounting,
Information Systems, and Technology Management.
The early chapters of this book offer simple frameworks for the development of isolated
organizational resources – customers, staff, and so on – before developing progressively
more detailed models for how these different resources are developed and sustained.
Instructors in marketing and sales, human resources, product development, and operations
management will therefore find a collection of frameworks that add important concepts to
their courses. These can be identified by reviewing the book in its entirety, noting examples
and frameworks that relate specifically to the functional course in question. It is then possible
to select from the book’s on-line resources and exercises just those elements required.
The book makes a particularly strong contribution to courses in entrepreneurship, focusing as it
does on the development, integration and sustaining of basic resources. Experience with students
using its frameworks for this context suggests that these add considerable confidence to the
resulting business plans for new ventures. Indeed, the launches of many such ventures have been
substantially revised and enhanced as a result of this scrutiny, whilst others that do not promise a
viable future have been abandoned. Chapters 1-4 provide the essential elements for this purpose,
whilst a review of the likely rivalry in which a new venture will be involved can be examined with
the tools in chapter 7.
The chapters are ordered as follows
Chapter 1 – Performance through time
Chapter 2 – Resources drive performance
Chapter 3 – Resource accumulation
Chapter 4 – Interdepence and the strategic architecture
Chapter 5 – Resource attributes
Chapter 6 – Resource development
Chapter 7 – Rivalry
Chapter 8 – Goals and controls
Chapter 9 – Intangible resources
Chapter 10 – Capabilities
More extensive information on the content of each chapter is available on our "SMD Resources" pages -
on the opening tab of each of the chapter pages.
