Leading at the Top (BUSA90506)

As a senior executive, playing a pivotal role in shaping strategy is crucial for strengthening the competitive advantage of your organisation. Developing an effective strategy involves aligning the efforts of various functional areas to determine the optimal products, markets, and segments for long-term success.  

This subject will equip you with the strategic frameworks and tools to assess your company’s internal resources and capabilities, analyse external market conditions, and identify the factors that drive sustainable competitive advantage. By leveraging these insights, you will be empowered to make high-level strategic decisions that ensure your organisation remains agile, competitive, and positioned for growth in dynamic environments.  

Some entrepreneurs and top managers are driven by a strong vision and intuition about which strategic choices are correct for their firm. Even for these leaders, making the right decisions to guide the company along the intended path requires anticipating and evaluating the consequences of various strategic alternatives, for which a solid understanding of the market forces is essential.    

Economics provides frameworks and a set of tools that help an executive manager develop and evaluate strategic options and make the right choices. Economics of strategy borrows from microeconomic theory concepts and techniques that enable a decision-maker to evaluate his or her strategic position, seek out new opportunities, and make fact-based, educated conjectures about their likely success. Our focus will be on decisions at the individual business unit level that aim at advancing a firm’s market position. We discuss a wide range of strategic issues the modern firm faces in its endeavour to establish and maintain profitability in a competitive and rapidly changing environment. 

Developing Strategy

On completion of this component students should:

• Critically examine the foundational principles of business strategy, with a focus on how competitive advantage drives sustainable success in dynamic environments.
• Apply strategic tools and frameworks, to analyse the external market forces and internal organisational resources in order to identify opportunities, threats, and areas for competitive positioning.
• Evaluate and design strategies to cultivate, leverage and sustain internal capabilities and core competencies that contribute to long-term organisational growth and advantage.

Ethical Leadership:

On completion of this component students should:

• Apply diverse moral reasoning frameworks to analyse and resolve complex ethical dilemmas encountered by senior executives in dynamic organisational contexts.
• Critically evaluate the ethical responsibilities of organisations including those related to social responsibility, supply chains and modern slavery, and emerging technologies and integrate these considerations into strategic goals and governance.
• Navigate and reconcile value-based conflicts in the workplace by embedding ethical reasoning into strategic decision-making to support sustainable and responsible business practices.

Economics of Strategy

On completion of this component students should:

• Analyse market dynamics across commodity, concentrated and structurally evolving industries, and formulate strategic responses to capitalisze on emerging opportunities and mitigate competitive threats.
• Evaluate and apply pricing strategies and market positioning techniques to enhance profitability and secure long-term competitive advantage.
• Design strategic approaches for high-stakes competitive environments, including auction and tender processes, to maximise value capture and strengthen the firm's market performance.

Leading with Influence for Impact II:

On completion of this component students will be able to:

• Enhance the ability to apply leadership and change management frameworks to diverse organisational contexts, improving agility and responsiveness to evolving business challenges.