Corporate Strategy: Resources and The Scope of The Firm

Book excerpt: CORPORATE STRATEGY breaks the mold. It is a completely new course whose design has been honed over six years of teaching at the Harvard Business School. It presents, for the first time, a single consistent framework for the analysis of corporate-level strategy. Based on the latest research in the resource-based view of the firm and organizational economics, it develops a rigorous approach to the many important issues surrounding the scope of the firm. Starting from the analysis of how valuable resources contribute to the competitive advantage of a single business, the book progresses through the analysis of scale, scope and vertical integration within an industry, to the treatment of diversification and the management of multibusiness firms. As such, it perfectly complements those required strategy courses that develop the notions of strategy as the internal consistency and external positioning of single business firms.