Build Your Own MBA – An award winning mini-MBA course

Build Your Own MBA – An award winning mini-MBA course

The future belongs to individuals who can collaborate at every level, not just within their own business, but across organisational boundaries, drawing on a diverse range of skills, perspectives and approaches.

This task becomes much easier when those individuals share a common strategic language and set of mental models that can help them to communicate where they want their business to go and how they wish to get there.

To meet this challenge, we have developed a set of frameworks and methodologies which incorporate the fundamental principles taught by the world’s leading business schools on MBA courses, that can be used to break down a business and its market into their component parts. This provides a modular and collaborative approach to developing, understanding and communicating strategy.

The course will enhance your commercial awareness and provide you with a collaborative way of:

• Analysing any business, its industry and market; and
• Developing strategies that will help your business rise to new levels of competitive performance.

Your will be introduced to seven, easy-to-follow steps (described below) which have been derived from the key methodologies taught on MBA courses by the world’s leading business schools.

Equipping you with this step-by-step guide to analysing a business will fill any gaps in your business knowledge and allow you to:

• Ask more substantive questions of your colleagues and business partners;
• Home in on the key issues and uncover new issues; and
• Apply your own knowledge and expertise in a way that is finely tuned and bespoke for your company’s specific needs.

On completing the course you will be able to:

1. Identify the critical factors for success within any market (Step 1 – Industry Analysis);
2. Diagrammatically represent a business’s position within its market by drawing a Strategy Canvas (Step 2 – Strategy Canvas);
3. Determine the best Business Strategies that should be pursued by a business (Step 3 – Strategy Selection);
4. Establish the Key Assets that create a business’s competitive advantage by drawing a Key Asset Map (Step 4 – Key Asset Maps and Functional Strategies);
5. Interpret change within a market (Step 5 – The Future 5 Forces Model and The Future Brand Identity Model);
6. Understand how a business can respond to change in a superior manner to the competition (Step 6 – Responding to Change and Building for the Future – The Resource Based View of Change); and
7. Gain an appreciation of corporate strategy and of how businesses pursue new opportunities in the form of new products, services and geographical markets (Step 7 – Corporate Strategy – The Sweet Spot of Opportunity).