Critical Business Skills for Success: Part I – Strategy

Critical Business Skills for Success: Part I- Strategy 

 

Everyone wants to know: What does it take to reach success in business—the kind of success that lasts? It all comes down to a solid grasp of the fundamentals of business—the same kind that are taught to MBA students in many of the world's most prestigious business schools.

 

Our comprehensive five-part, 60-lecture course, Critical Business Skills for Success, is designed to give you just this kind of integrated, accessible introduction. Bringing together five prestigious and renowned business professors from some of America's top business schools, each of this course's five parts is a detailed look at a particular skill:

 

 Strategy,

 Operations,

 Finance and accounting,

 Organizational behavior, and

 Marketing.

 

Here in one place is an authoritative guide to the five essential disciplines that everyone, entry-level employees and CEOs alike, needs to master in order to reap rewards in today's complex marketplace.

 

In each part, you'll learn about everything from key terms and methodologies to research-backed strategies and case studies involving some of the world's most influential companies.

 

This kind of well-rounded business education is useful to anyone who works in a company of any size. Whether you're in a leadership position, just starting out, or somewhere in between, these skills will help you understand all of the functions of a business, not just your area of specialty. It's also a great resource to have, even if you already have an MBA, as you can return to this course again and again for advice and clarification.

 

Bringing the MBA experience right to you, Critical Business Skills for Success demystifies the secrets of business and gives you insights that will help you achieve your goals.

 

 

Strategy

 

Where, and with whom, will your business compete? What will you do, and not do, as a company? How will you create advantages that put you ahead of the competition? You can have the world's greatest product and the most effective marketing for selling that product, but if you don't have an effective strategy underlying your business or organization, a template for how it should run, you'll find it hard to stay on top of the business world.

 

Why is a crystal-clear strategy an essential piece of the business puzzle? In the words of popular Great Courses Professor Michael A. Roberto of Bryant University, it's because businesses can't do everything. "And so you have to be very clear about how you're going to use your resources in the most efficient way possible, both to serve the customers you intend to serve and to serve them better than anyone else."

 

Now you can learn straight from an award-winning business instructor the secrets to developing, executing, and managing powerful business strategies with Critical Business Skills: Strategy. Award-winning Professor Roberto’s 12 lectures provide you with a research-based framework for understanding how strategy works and how to apply it.

 

 

Get Two Angles on Business Strategy

 

Business strategy is one of the business world's most crucial activities. It's the template for how your organization should run, and comes before anything else. Throughout these lectures, you'll explore strategy from two fundamental angles:

 

 You'll examine the world of business unit strategy, focusing on how particular companies use strategic frameworks to beat their rivals in a particular product market.

 You'll also take a step back and explore the concept of corporate strategy, and how multi-business units and diversified companies strategically operate in a variety of product markets.

 

But most important are the many specific strategies you'll learn how to formulate, wield, and apply to your own unique business situations.

 

Take On Tomorrow's Business Challenges

 

Professor Roberto, using his years of experience in the business world and his piercing insights into business strategy, includes in each lecture of Critical Business Skills: Strategy stories of real-world successes (and failures) involving major companies of the past decade, including J.C. Penney, the Walt Disney Company, Target, and AOL Time Warner. An eight-time winner of Bryant University's prestigious Excellence in Teaching Award, he knows how to make this subject, and the research behind it, undeniably captivating and essential for any well-rounded understanding of how great businesses succeed and how poor businesses fail.

 

Instructor Biography

 

The Great Courses, Experience the Joy of Lifelong Learning

 

The Great Courses is the premier publisher of educational video and audio courses that are designed to meet the powerful and rapidly growing consumer demand for personal development and lifelong learning. The pioneer of the concept of engaging, direct-to-consumer university-level courses, The Great Courses has a catalog of more than 450 courses led by the world’s top professors and experts in a broad range of subjects across science, mathematics, philosophy, history, literature, fine arts and music, better living, business, and personal development. Our esteemed faculty members are drawn from the most respected institutions in the world and, uniquely, are selected by our customers exclusively for their ability to teach. Our courses, too, are produced only after we survey our community of lifelong learners on course concepts and gain their approval. The result—compelling courses taught by engaging instructors at the top of their fields.