Executive Program in Strategy and Organization

Strategic management. Organizational theory. Personal leadership. The Executive Program in Strategy and Organization focuses on all three. Through pioneering multidisciplinary research from Stanford GSB faculty, you’ll learn how to create a strategy that aligns with your organization, culture, and the environment in which you compete. Experience two academically rigorous weeks packed with lectures, hands-on exercises, case studies, and discussion groups.

At Stanford, we focus on frameworks that help you think in new ways about the strategic challenges and opportunities you face — why some strategies work and others fail. We’ll examine the different aspects and approaches to strategy, while engaging in topics such as economic incentives, game theory, organizational culture, and being a successful leader. Rather than getting a checklist of best practices, you’ll come away with the skills you need to create powerful, winning action plans.

It’s a unique opportunity to learn things you won’t find in the news or business books, and immerse yourself with fellow executives in a learning environment that cultivates an innovative mindset to bring back to your organization.

Why do some organizations fail while others succeed? How do you create a strategy that aligns with your competencies and culture? How do you sustain a competitive advantage?

Winning strategies are required. But they won’t be generated in a planning group. They’ll develop at the Executive Program in Strategy and Organization, a two-week comprehensive program designed to help you “do the right thing” rather than “do things right.” The program gives you a unique opportunity to diagnose and solve strategic problems and create action plans for implementing real change.

Below are just a few of the sessions you’ll experience as part of this program.

To be adaptive requires managers and companies to be ambidextrous — that is, to consciously adopt different strategies and organizational alignments for different businesses. This session will illustrate how some companies have been able to develop the dynamic capabilities needed to do this.

Company capabilities are strategic advantages that derive from things that your business does that others cannot do, or cannot do as well. For instance, your company might be more innovative than others, deliver consistently better service, or produce goods with fewer defects and greater reliability than anyone else can. As a strategic leader, you should always be concerned with developing and strengthening your business’s capability-based advantages. In this session, we will explore the role of organization in generating capability-based advantages, and introduce a framework for analyzing organizational design and strategic alignment.

Whether we like it or not, AI is changing how organizations operate. In this non-technical session, we will focus not on how AI works, but on the kinds of problems it can solve. We will distinguish between predictive and generative AI, and introduce frameworks for understanding which kinds of tasks can be fully outsourced to AI, which can be augmented by AI, and which should remain exclusively the purview of human decision-makers. As we will discuss, AI introduces many opportunities and risks. Successful organizations will integrate AI into their operations without ceding strategic decision-making to the machines.

A key step in leading innovation within your enterprise is obtaining the resources needed to fund that innovation. To do so, it is usually necessary to convince others of the financial and strategic merits. In these sessions, we will see how to build a financial model that will allow you to make a decision about whether to fund a new investment in a product, project, or business. As we will see, a financial model is a critical tool that enables you to estimate both the resources needed and the return that can be generated by a new opportunity. Moreover, you can use the financial model to better understand both the risk and the opportunities that the project represents.

One of the most important determinants of a company’s performance is the attractiveness of the industry in which it competes. This session will provide practical tools for conducting an industry analysis and for evaluating a business’s position in its industry.

What should management do when a crisis focuses the harsh spotlight of public opinion on their organization? Whether it results from a company’s own missteps (think BP) or from strategic activism or media action (think Greenpeace), dealing with crisis is increasingly on the agenda for today’s executives. In this session, we will explore the skills and organizational structures that enable leaders to prepare for and productively manage a crisis, and prevent lasting damage to an organization’s reputation.

Oftentimes, managers and leaders in a company lack an effective way of engaging with each other on strategic issues. Despite the fact that many people have important and valuable insights, the crafting of a company’s strategy is reduced to a set of broadly stated goals in a slide presentation. Changing this process and the articulation of strategy requires that those in the business develop a set of skills for engaging in constructive strategic arguments. In this session, we focus on sharpening strategic acumen by illustrating and applying a framework for constructive strategic arguments.

For a company to achieve superior overall performance, its strategy beyond markets must be integrated with its market strategy. This series of sessions considers companies’ strategic interactions with important constituents, organizations, and institutions outside of markets. Topics of discussion will include boycotts, legislation, and enforcement of intellectual property rules, all of which can substantially impact performance and profitability.