MIS 44285-006 TENTATIVE SYLLABUS
16158 - Acar
INTEGRATED BUSINESS POLICY & STRATEGY
Fall 2014
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INSTRUCTOR Dr. W. Acar. On M-W evenings, the atrium of the M&IS department Telephone: 330- 673-6514 E-mail: wacar@kent.edu Office hours: M-W 4:30-5:30 pm, W 6:45-7:15 pm & by appointment Class: M in 219 Bowman Hall, 7:00-9:45 pm

TEXT “Essentials of Strategic Management” by Charles W.L. Hill & Gareth R. Jones South-Western / CENGAGE Learning-, 2012 (3rd edition) ISBN-10: 1-111-52519-6 ISBN-13: 978-1-111-52519-4

COURSE OBJECTIVES

This "capstone" course is intended to provide senior students with an opportunity to further develop their critical thinking by using comparative analysis to integrate the diverse disciplinary knowledge acquired in their earlier courses. On the practical side, since business firms are the main producers as well as distributors of wealth, it behooves them to better manage their current and future resources and in light of potential environmental change. Gaining a better understanding of strategic theory will go a long way toward increasing profitability. The course therefore aims at introducing the students to the principal concepts of strategic management, as well as sensitizing them to the influence of environmental and competitive changes in this age of increasing uncertainty.

COURSE PREREQUISITES

This course assumes that you have “senior standing” and are close to completing most of your graduation requirements. In order not to risk deregistration, in case of doubt please check with the UPO in room 107.

COURSE REGISTRATION It is the students’ responsibility to ensure they are properly enrolled in classes. Using Student Tools on FlashLine, you are advised to review your official class schedule during the first two weeks of the semester to ensure you are properly enrolled in this class and section. Should you find an error in your class schedule, you need to correct it with the advising office no later than Sunday 7 September. If registration errors are not corrected by these dates and you continue to attend or participate in classes in which you are not officially enrolled, you are now advised that you will not receive a grade at the conclusion of the semester for any class in which you are not properly registered.

COURSE PRINCIPLES

It is essential that you not only learn to understand a firm’s situation as depicted in a case study, but you also need to be able to extract from it a sense of its strengths and weaknesses. The field of Strategy has progressed well beyond the limited question: “In what business should we be?” The authors of your textbook are a well-known economist and a well-known organization theorist. In addition to gauging the strengths and weaknesses of a firm, you have to be able to sense the looming threats and opportunities potentially available. The approach of your instructor to the management of uncertainty is known as the scenario approach, to the development of which he has been a contributor. Can one do more than learn to avoid threats; could one ever hope to learn to turn them into opportunities? Organizational consultants are now spreading the faddish belief that environmental turbulence can best be handled by last-minute incrementalism; such a defeatist attitude may turn a firm into one that is “penny-wise, but pound foolish”. Instead of a focus on managing for the short term, this course will start you thinking in terms of strategic opportunities.
COURSE PROCEDURE

This type of course cannot be ingested passively, but requires your active participation in and before class. It has to become an interactive course. This will render it more rather than less interesting, since what you get out of a course is in direct relation to the effort that goes into it. Students will organize themselves into teams of 4-5 people