Syllabus B189 — Spring 2017

Room	BBC 103
Day	Thursday
Time	6pm-8:45pm

Instructor:	Simon Rodan
Office:	BT 457
Office Hours:	Thursday 4:30-5:45pm
Skype:	simonrodan
Email:	simon.rodan@sjsu.edu

Course Description

Integrative capstone seminar analyzing inter-relationships of managerial decisions/actions within and between the firm and its environment. Applies multi-disciplinary techniques to diagnose and recommend actions appropriate to specific company situations, using case method.

Prerequisites: COMM 100W or ENGL 100WB or LLD 100WB. The course is restricted to graduating seniors only.

You are expected to remember and apply the fundamental ideas, techniques and approaches from your accounting (B20 and B21), finance (B170), marketing (B130), orgnizational behaviour (B160) and operations management (B140) classes.

Program Level Learning Objectives

• To sharpen students' ability to think critically, logically and strategically.
• To diagnose business situations from a strategic perspective.

Course Learning Objectives

By the end of the course students should be able to demonstrate an ability to:

• Apply the following strategic analyitical perspectives to unfamiliar business situations
  • Value-price-cost framework
  • The Resource Based View of the firm
  • Industry and competitive analysis (Porter’s 5 forces model)
  • Generic strategies
  • Economies of scale, experience and learning
  • Diversification
  • Transaction costs economics and vertical integration
• Apply the knowledge, tools and techniques you have studied in your courses in marketing (130), operations management (140), accounting and finance (20, 21), and management (160 or 161a/161b) in the context of a business simulation.

Required Reading

There are two required readings for this course.

The first is Rothaermel, Frank, Strategic Management: Concepts and Cases, 3rd Edition. This is a version of the book customized for this class. It is significantly cheaper than buying the complete book (we will be using only a small proportion of the cases in the complete book and removing them from the custome text reduces the costs significantly).

Follow this link to buy the book

The second is a collection of handouts, “Supplemental Readings in Strategy” which you can download here.

Evaluation

Class contribution (10%) At the end of the semseter, I make an assessment of the contribution you have made to the plenary class discussions. I tend to ask questions of the class as a whole and will rarely call on you individually to answer a question; so it is up to you to volunteer information. At a minimum, you must show that you have prepared for the class. Beyond knowing basic facts about the case, I will look for your ability to think logically and to connect the different theories we look at to the case material.

Exams (35%) There is one mid-term exam and a final which will respectively count for 15% and 20% of your course grade. The exams will generally require either short answers or a single short essay based on a 3-4 page fictional case. Spelling and grammatical errors will reduce your grade.

Simulation (40%) Your grade in the simulation exercise will be based on:

• your financial achievement in the simulation based on the z-score or pro-score metrics (15%),
• the quality of your business plan, in partucular its coherence and the clarity of the writing (10%)
• the accuracy of your team’s sales forecast (5%)
• your final presentation (10%). In your presentation you should explain:
  • the strategy you adopted and how you translated your chosen strategy into your operational decisions
  • the targets you set out in your business plan and your achievement against them

Peer 360 evaluation (15%) 4 times during the semester you will be asked to make an assessment of your team members’ contributions. Each assessment counts for 5% and the best 3 out ot 4 will be used in calculating your grade. You must complete your evaluation for your team’s assessment of your performance to be counted towards you grade.

Grading scheme

I do not use a fixed scale to assign final letter grades. Since exams may vary in difficulty from semester to semester and I often introduce new ones, a fixed scale would be unfair. My approach is to determine the grading scale approximately based on the highest and lowest total scores for the semester’s work. This means you are not penalized if I set a particularly hard exam. This is not a forced curve, but the ends of the scale are determined by the range in perfomance across all the evaluation dimensions mentioned above. Differently abled students should contact me if these evaluation procedures are not appropriate.

Following a recent change in university policy, there are no extra credit assignments.

Class schedule

Dec 31st, 1969 (Wednesday)	9. Mid-tem Exam
Class agenda:	Mid-term exam 2 ½ hours, open book   Assignment due – Forecasting assignment