Strategic Planning and Execution

This week, you'll connect strategic analysis to strategy execution. You'll walk through a series of questions to frame your analysis and ground your approach using the strategist's toolkit--and you'll learn a new tool, Hypothesis Testing, to unearth key assumptions related to choosing a strategy and assessing the validity of those assumptions. You'll also review data sources and how to "make the data speak" to guide your strategy decisions.

This week you'll learn about how strategy gets set and implemented in organizations. You'll discuss factors key to effective strategy formulation--and common challenges and pitfalls of strategy execution. You'll explore four different approaches to strategy formulation and how governance ties into effective strategy formulation.

We welcome Professor Scott Snell to the course this week! He's a global specialist in strategy execution, and he shares his 4A Model for effective strategy execution: alignment, ability, agility, and architecture. This framework will help you ensure the human and organizational resources are in place to effectively execute your strategy.