Strategic Thinking: A Learning-Focused Approach to Strategic Management - Paperback

Strategic Thinking: A Learning-Focused Approach to Strategic Management is an undergraduate textbook built around a simple premise: the sequence in which strategy is taught should follow how students learn, not how professors organize the field.

Most strategic management texts open with sweeping analytical frameworks, asking students to evaluate global political and economic forces before they understand what differentiation is or how a firm creates value in the first place. Because so much of strategy is interrelated, this framework-first structure forces constant forward references to material students have not yet encountered. The result is coverage without comprehension.

This book takes the opposite approach. It moves from foundational concepts to frameworks, from the firm to the industry to the external environment, and from the entrepreneur's perspective to the corporate executive's. Students learn what a firm is and why firms exist before analyzing industry structure. They encounter SWOT analysis only after learning the internal and external analysis tools that give its four quadrants meaning.

The text is also built for instructor flexibility. Compact chapter sections let a typical semester course cover two sections per class meeting while still leaving room for exams and group presentations. Within a single class, instructors can pair one section with extended experiential activities or case discussion, or move through several when a lecture-focused day fits the goals. Supporting materials include lecture slides, in-class activities, reading check quizzes, and test banks.

Written by two strategy professors who have taught the course at Texas A&M, Tulane, Maryland, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Arkansas, the book grew out of years of refining the sequence with students.

Six chapters cover the course: Foundations of Strategy; Business-Level Strategy; Internal Analysis; Industry and External Environment Analysis; Corporate-Level Strategy; and Corporate Governance and Business in Society. Coverage includes the theory of the firm, the value chain, the Business Model Canvas, the resource-based view, dynamic capabilities, Porter's Five Forces, competitive dynamics, industry life cycles, PESTEL and SWOT analysis, vertical integration, strategic alliances, diversification, mergers and acquisitions, principal-agent problems, executive compensation, ethical decision-making, corporate social responsibility and ESG, and non-market strategy.