Strategic Management: Creating and Sustaining Competitive Advantage 

Hello. I’m Shaz Ansari. I work as a Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. As is the case in Cambridge, I’m also part of a College. So I’m a Professorial Fellow at St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. I’m also the Subject Group Head (or, the Department Chair) of the department of Strategy and International Business at the Business School.

A core area of my research is strategy and strategic management. I’ve always been intrigued by the question of why some firms perform better than others. It cannot be brought down to luck or skills. So what is it that makes certain organisations more successful, have a bigger say, have a bigger impact. And that’s the question that’s intrigued me for over a decade, both in my research as well as in my responsibilities as an educator.

In designing this course, Strategic Management, we’ve ensured a learning journey that allows you to make sense of this field of strategy and strategic management in a coherent manner. So beginning from, what is strategy, what does it mean to be strategic, what is strategic management overall, to learning about generic strategies, to learning about cutting-edge frameworks that exist today in the world of strategy, to understanding how you would develop your own strategy based on the tools and frameworks we provide. How will you implement those strategies effectively? How will you be leaders of strategy in your organisation?

To make this learning journey more effective, more enriching for you, we use a wide array of methodological tools. This includes not just lectures but peer-to-peer learning as well as group work. You guys bring a wealth of experience that we also want to collectively benefit from.

This will also include case studies. This will also include simulations as well as frameworks and tools that we have developed here at the Business School alongside colleagues to make sure you can take these frameworks and tools back to your organisation and get better at designing strategy, implementing strategy, to make sure you’re staying ahead of everybody else in your game.

A key question we ask in strategy and strategic management is, what’s your distinctive advantage? What differentiates you? The same question can be asked about, why Cambridge? Specifically, why Cambridge Judge Business School? A key factor that differentiates Cambridge Judge Business School from peer schools is our personalised attention to individuals and the group and making sure that we have small class sizes that we can attend to challenges that you specifically face in your organisation and take those challenges to our learning processes and help you benefit and implement the changes that you’re going to then carry forward after your programme.

So it gives you a very personalised experience because of the small class sizes. At the same time, we have this philosophy of ensuring a seamless fit between the research we do and what we share in our education and our teaching. So we would like to have as close as seamless a connection between the research and our teaching.

So all the research we do is useful when we see this being applied, when we see this being useful to you guys, when we see that this research is not just helping us publish papers, but it’s also helping you design more effective strategies. And that’s our aim as educators, that our research actually resonates with practitioner audiences like you. And that’s an advantage that Cambridge brings to the table. And I encourage you to make sure you benefit from it.

So I hope you got an overview of how we have designed this learning journey and this programme for you. I do look forward to you coming to Cambridge. We are wonderful hosts. And I look forward to interacting with you, not just myself but all of my colleagues. We’ll together have a fantastic learning experience and have fun too.