--- title: Business Strategy description: This topic covers the formulation and execution of long-term business plans to achieve competitive advantage. Learners will understand market analysis, resource allocation, strategic positioning, and how to adapt to changing industry landscapes. category: business-entrepreneurship subcategory: business-fundamentals difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced url: /subject/business-strategy --- # Business Strategy This topic covers the formulation and execution of long-term business plans to achieve competitive advantage. Learners will understand market analysis, resource allocation, strategic positioning, and how to adapt to changing industry landscapes. ## Available Resources 6 Books • 3 Courses • 3 Websites ## Websites ### 1. Harvard Business Review - Strategy Harvard Business Review's strategy topic hub, collecting articles by practitioners and academics on competitive strategy, positioning, corporate strategy and execution. Readers can follow current management thinking and case examples to sharpen how they frame and evaluate strategic choices. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://hbr.org/topic/strategy **Tags:** strategy, competitive-strategy, business-strategy, strategic-thinking, management ### 2. strategyzer.com Strategyzer provides tools and training for designing, testing, and scaling business models, featuring the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas along with templates, case studies, and practical guides. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://strategyzer.com **Tags:** websites, business-entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship ### 3. hbr.org Harvard Business Review (hbr.org) offers research-based articles, case studies, and practical guidance on leadership, strategy, and organizational performance for managers and executives. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://hbr.org **Tags:** websites, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ## Books ### 1. The Innovator's Dilemma **Author:** Clayton M. Christensen Seminal work on disruptive innovation explaining why successful companies fail when facing technological disruption despite good management practices. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Management-Innovation/dp/1633691780?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** book, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ### 2. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future **Author:** Peter Thiel, Blake Masters PayPal co-founder's contrarian thinking on building monopolies, creating new markets, and avoiding competition through technological innovation. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** book, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ### 3. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't **Author:** Jim Collins Data-driven study identifying principles distinguishing great companies from merely good ones, introducing Level 5 leadership and flywheel concepts. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/0066620996?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** book, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ### 4. Competitive Strategy **Author:** Michael E. Porter Porter's 1980 framework for industry analysis: the five competitive forces, three generic strategies, and structural analysis of rivals. After reading, you can assess an industry's profitability drivers and position a firm within it. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0875842437?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ### 5. Good Strategy Bad Strategy **Author:** Richard Rumelt Rumelt argues most corporate strategy is goal-setting dressed up as analysis, and defines a kernel of diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent action. Readers finish able to distinguish real strategy from slogans and financial targets. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1781256179?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ### 6. Blue Ocean Strategy **Author:** W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne Case studies and tools — the strategy canvas, four actions framework, value curve — for competing by creating uncontested market space rather than out-fighting rivals. You will learn to map an industry's competing factors and redraw them. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591396190?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ## Courses ### 1. Business Strategy In this course you will learn how organizations create, capture, and maintain value. In doing so, you’ll develop an understanding of how and why this process is fundamental for sustainable competitive advantage. You will be able to better understand value creation, and capture and learn the tools to analyze both competition and cooperation from a variety of perspectives, including the industry-level (e.g., five forces analysis) and the firm-level (e.g., business models and strategic positioning). You will be able to: - Understand how managers coordinate different functional areas, resources, and systems inside a company and align them with the external environment to enhance overall performance - Recognize strategic management tools and frameworks and apply them to real business contexts - Process diverse business and industry information to diagnose strategic issues, evaluate strategic alternatives, and formulate a coherent and actionable strategic plan This course is part of Gies College of Business’ suite of online programs, including the iMBA and iMSM. Learn more about admission into these programs and explore how your Coursera work can be leveraged if accepted into a degree program at https://degrees.giesbusiness.illinois.edu/idegrees/. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Duration:** 4 weeks of study, 4-6 hours/week | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/strategy-business **Tags:** courses, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ### 2. Strategic Management Learn how a manager or CEO develops a business strategy, including analyzing the market and creating competitive advantage. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Duration:** 4 weeks of study, 2-4 hours/week | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.edx.org/learn/strategic-management/indian-institute-of-management-bangalore-strategic-management **Tags:** courses, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ### 3. Advanced Business Strategy Advance your strategic analysis skills in this follow-up to Foundations of Business Strategy. In this course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, you'll learn the tools to analyze strategy across time (competitive dynamics), industries (corporate strategy), geographies (international strategy), and institutions (non-market strategy). Top-ranked faculty will introduce the tools you need to complete a comprehensive evaluation and understand the strategy dynamics of an industry: Competitive Lifecycle, Internationalization and Stakeholder Analyses, and Diversification Matrices. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Duration:** 4 weeks of study, 2-6 hours/week | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/uva-darden-advanced-business-strategy **Tags:** courses, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals --- *This content is part of Dantes.io - Your Treasure Map to Knowledge* *Curated by humans at Dantes.io. Personal study use welcome; republishing this curation requires permission (team@dantes.io).* View this page online: https://dantes.io/subject/business-strategy