4 Reflections From “Strategic Management”

Another Day In My MBA

Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash

If you’ve come here for textbook strategic management lessons, you’ll find many more articulate, thoughtful, and incisive texts elsewhere on the web.

This blog post has a much simpler aim: to apply each of the lessons from last night’s interactive session to my own life.

So, without much ado…

1. Positioning Is Everything

Personal branding experts, rejoice. This is our time to shine.

A fundamental strategy I will be deploying in my career and writing: have precise answers to each of the below.

Who am I, what are my strengths, what problems do I solve, where do I want to be, what do I do better than anybody else I know and what am I not?

Too often, I’ve been the jack of all trades. And while generalists do get their 15 minutes of fame, those having a clear, well-defined strategy do better.

I can’t be everything to everybody every time.

2. Do Value Chains Add Value?

Direct-to-consumer. Bean-to-cup. Farm-to-plate.

Thanks to advances in technology, all industries are seeing an upheaval in the classic value chain. End result…