Strategic Thinking

Risk is a fact of life for businesses and as a manager, you must know how to manage it. But before you can do that, you need to assess the risk in order to create a strategy to avoid or mitigate it. In this course, you will learn common techniques to assess risk, including opportunity assessment, and threat assessment using FMEA - failure mode and effects analysis.

When developing competitive marketing strategies, one of the most important steps is carrying out effective research and analysis. You need to assess your organizational capabilities as well as your marketing activities. This course describes how to conduct an internal analysis as part of the process of developing competitive marketing strategies. It explains the types of questions you may need to ask about your organizational resources and capabilities. And it describes areas to consider when doing a marketing audit and looking at innovation activities.

As a manager, it's important that you understand and prepare for risk. This course focuses on identifying risk factors, which is the first stage of risk management. It outlines key techniques you can use to identify risk including how to use root cause identification, the Delphi technique, and brainstorming sessions.

Charting the future requires leaders to think strategically. Strategic thinking synthesizes information and ideas for competitive advantage and future success. In this course, you'll learn how to promote and apply strategic thinking.

Once you have identified and assessed risks, you then have to deal with them. This course covers general strategies for dealing with risk, such as risk exposure adjustment and contingency planning. It also outlines specific strategies for dealing with both threats and opportunities.

It's important that all professionals in an organization learn how to think strategically in order to help them in their management tasks. This course explores the characteristics of strategic thinking as well as the traits you need to be an effective strategic thinker. It also covers how to develop your capacity for thinking strategically though being creative, being prepared to deal with complexity, and being aware of what's going on inside and outside your organization.

Big-picture thinking stretches beyond the short term and considers how an organization can succeed in the longer term. This course describes how the ideas of systems thinking can help you elevate your perspective, become skillful at making sense out of opposites and contradictions, and better understand cause and effect while managing your department. It also explains actions you can take to encourage big-picture thinking and how understanding the organizational value chain can help you connect to the organization's strategy and strategic plans and implement them more effectively.