The Methods Most Managers Aren’t Taught — Our Leading Strategic Growth and Change Curriculum — Part 1

Competitive advantages have life cycles — born in innovation, scaled up with launching, making a profit by operating and eventually transforming to the next advantage. Unfortunately for leaders in today’s fast-paced contexts, we tend to only teach the “operating” part of this story. My Columbia Executive Education course “Leading Strategic Growth and Change” fills in the blanks. Here are some quick session descriptions of our first two days. To learn more, visit this page.

The End of Competitive Advantage and the New Strategy Playbook

Strategy has, for years, maintained that the ultimate goal is to establish a sustainable competitive advantage. In this session, which draws from McGrath’s award-winning book The End of Competitive Advantage, participants will learn about the life cycle of an advantage — beginning with the unpredictable and highly variable innovation process, through launch, exploitation and eventual erosion of an advantage. The skills participants are often not taught have to do with the innovation/launch part of the process and the erosion / transformation part.

This session will introduce six new elements of the new strategy playbook, which are: