Material Detail

This is a free, online textbook from Saylor Foundation. Teaching the strategic management course can be a challenge for many professors. In most business schools, strategic management is a “capstone” course that requires students to draw on insights from various functional courses they have completed (such as marketing, finance, and accounting) in order to understand how top executives make the strategic decisions that drive whether organizations succeed or fail. Although students have taken these functional courses, many students have very little experience with major organizational choices. It is this inexperience that can undermine many students’ engagement in the course. Mastering Strategic Management by Dave Ketchen and Jeremy Short is designed to enhance student engagement in three innovative ways. . The first is through visual adaptations of the key content in the book. It is well documented that many of today’s students are visual learners. To meet students’ wants and needs (and thereby create a much better teaching experience for professors), Mastering Strategic Management contains multiple graphic concept pages in ever section of every chapter of the book. Think of graphic concept pages as almost like info-graphics for key concepts in each section. This feature sets Mastering Strategic Management apart from any strategic management book on the market today. . The second way Dave and Jeremy capture student interest through their textbook is by using a real-world company as the running example in each chapter. For example, Chapter 1 in Mastering Strategic Management utilizes Apple to harness the conceptual coverage of the chapter in a running, corporate, application to which students will relate. . The third inventive way Mastering Strategic Management holds the attention of strategic management students is through the “strategy at the movies” feature in each chapter that links course concepts with a popular motion picture. In Chapter 1, for example, the authors describe how “The Social Network” illustrates intended, emergent, and realized strategies. .