Essentials of Strategic Management: The Quest for Competitive Advantage
John E. Gamble,
University of South Alabama Arthur A. Thompson, Jr.,
University of Alabama
ISBN: 0073530301 Copyright year: 2009
Book Preface
Essentials of Strategic Management responds head-on to the growing requests
by business faculty for a concise, conceptually strong strategic management text with mainstream coverage. This first edition text was written with four objectives in mind: (1) To provide students with an up-to-date and thorough understanding of essential strategic management concepts and analytic tools; (2) To simplify the task of demonstrating student learning through courseembedded assessment; (3) To provide an attractive set of contemporary cases that involve headline strategic issues and that give students ample opportunities to apply what they read in the chapters; and (4) To complement use of a
business strategy simulation.
The nine-chapter presentation provides coverage of essential topics expected by the vast majority of faculty teaching undergraduate and MBA strategic management courses. But the coverage is not skimpy or definition driven. We’ve provided solid explanations and real-world illustrations of strategies keyed to industry positioning, corporate-level strategy, and various
strategic management analytical tools. In addition, we believe our coverage of resource-based strategies and Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard and Strategy Maps is unmatched by other “essential” texts in the field.
Through our experiences as college of business faculty members and administrators, we also fully understand the assessment demands on faculty teaching strategic management courses. In many institutions, capstone courses have emerged as the logical home for assessing student achievement of program learning objectives. Essentials of Strategic Management includes a number of interesting Assurance of Learning Exercises at the end of each chapter that you can use as a basis for class discussion or to demonstrate student learning through written assignments and/or team presentations. Instructors can easily pair the Assurance of Learning Exercises with instructor-developed scoring rubrics to assess course or program learning outcomes.
Complementing the text presentation is a truly appealing lineup of 14 diverse, timely, and thoughtfully crafted cases. All of the cases are tightly linked to the content of the nine chapters, thus pushing students to apply the concepts and analytical tools they have read about. Twelve of the 14 cases were written by the coauthors to illustrate specific tools of
analysis or distinct strategic management theories. The two cases included in the text not written by the coauthors were chosen because of their exceptional linkage to strategic management concepts presented in the text. We are confident you will be impressed with how well each of the 14 cases in the collection will work in the classroom and the amount of student interest they will spark.
This book by no means “requires” parallel use of a simulation but it fits the needs of simulation users perfectly. The relatively short length of each chapter gives students more time for simulation activities that illustrate the application of chapter concepts. In addition, each chapter contains an Assurance of Learning Exercise designed to drive home the linkage between the strategic management concepts presented in the chapter and the decision-making challenges of running a simulation company.
We’ve done our very best to ensure that the Essentials of Strategic Management
package will work especially well for you in the classroom, help you economize on the time needed to be well-prepared for each class, and cause students to conclude that your course is one of the very best they have ever taken—from the standpoint of both enjoyment and learning.
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2009 McGraw-Hill Higher Education