Phanish Puranam: Teaching

1. Corporate Strategy

This elective addresses the topic of strategic analysis at the corporate HQ level in multi business companies, which is qualitatively very different from strategy at the individual business unit level (the focus of the core course in Strategy).

The primary aim of this course is to help students assess corporate strategies and develop superior ones.  The course is particularly useful for those intending to advise, work in and eventually lead Corporate Headquarters in multi-business groups.  It builds on many concepts covered in the core Strategy I course and links to other courses in Finance and Organizational Behaviour.

Download Corporate Strategy outline

2. Designing Collaborative Structure (NEW!) 

Organizations enable us to work together to achieve objectives that would be unthinkable for individuals acting alone. They reflect our talent for harnessing gains from collaboration, and may well be humanity's most important invention. Though we live in a world of organizations, too often we take them and their inefficiencies for granted. We may have the grace to laugh at the mess they sometimes are (e.g. Dilbert) but most of us who work in organizations seem to lack the tolls to make them work better. This course helps students develop a rigorous undertaking of basic principles of organization and organizing that are relevant to understanding ant colonies as well as strategic alliances. We will consider applications of the basic principles to domains such as M&A integration, the structuring of alliances, inter-departmental and inter-divisional collaboration, the organization of teams and distributed work (e.g. off-shoring and open source).

Phanish is among the "World's 40 best business school professors under the age of 40"