Career Focus

Leaders who aspire to run successful enterprises need to connect the dots tightly around their business model, their core technology and their competitive advantage in the market. Difficult enough, but the reward for building a successful business is that the leader must then spot when external conditions require a change to the formula. And the more successful the business, the harder that change will be to pull off. This course, which introduces a series of powerful frameworks for navigating these critical moments in enterprise growth, will prove valuable to students who anticipate founding, managing, advising, or investing in any of a variety of companies—from category-creating startups to industry-leading incumbents. Our goal is to increase your personal impact as a leader, as well as your odds of achieving successful outcomes.

Educational Objectives

The focus of the course is to learn to use well-researched causal theories about strategy, innovation, and management to understand why things happen the way they do in businesses, and to predict which tools, strategies, and methods will and will not be effective in the various circumstances in which our students find themselves. We integrate a unique understanding of strategy formulation with practical solutions to the execution challenges faced by general managers seeking to maximize positive outcomes.

The language and frameworks of the BSSE course have become widely accepted and acknowledged among HBS alumni and beyond as a series of powerful lenses through which to understand the most important challenges facing business leaders.

Course Content and Objectives

This is a foundational general management course built around former Professor Clayton Christensen’s globally applied decision-making frameworks. Early sessions will introduce models about the key jobs of the general manager, who must integrate the marketing, product development, operations, strategic planning, financial, and human dimensions of the enterprise. We will employ these models throughout the course to understand the root causes of the challenges that the general managers in our cases are facing, and to develop action plans for resolving them. During case discussions, we will seek to answer some of the following questions, which are relevant to companies of all sizes:

1. What does disruptive innovation really mean—and how does it work?
2. How can entrants disrupt market leaders, and what can market leaders do to avoid disruption?
3. Who is our ideal customer, and how can selecting the wrong customers derail your growth?
4. What’s the hidden danger of core competence theory? How should we decide which activities to keep in-house and which to outsource?
5. What’s the signal that an industry is about to commoditize, and how can we profit from that shift?
6. How do we set strategy in a rapidly changing world (where unknowns vastly outweigh knowns)?
7. Whose investment capital will help us, and whose money might undermine our chances of success?
8. To what extent do commonly used performance metrics kill innovation, and how can we develop metrics that encourage new growth?
9. Can acquisitions become a pathway to new capabilities? Should we integrate acquired companies or keep them separate?
10. What is the role of the CEO in building new growth engines within established companies?

Course Organization and Grading

The course includes a final paper, to be completed by teams. The paper will not require field or library research; instead, it will provide an opportunity for students to apply theories and frameworks introduced in the course to explore the opportunities and challenges of a company they know and/or in which they have a current interest. (This is a great opportunity to understand deeply a company you are interested in working for, or investing in.)