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Hi, I'm Allen Amason.
I'm the Dean of the Parker
College of Business
at Georgia Southern University.
I'm also a scholar and professor
of strategic management,
talking about strategic
management and
within that context
specifically about
corporate strategy.
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One of the fascinating
things about
strategic management
broadly is that it
deals with multiple
layers of analysis,
multiple layers of
phenomenon that
while highly interrelated,
are nevertheless distinct.
I can illustrate
that distinction
by a couple of quick questions.
Sometimes people will look
at strategic management and
organizational strategy and they
will illustrate it
with the question,
what business is the
organization in?
That question is very different
from the second
one that I'll ask,
which is, how will
an organization compete in
that particular business?
Now, the reason this is
interesting is because
these two questions actually
reflect two different
levels of analysis.
If you think about it, a
corporation could be in
multiple different businesses
and so the question,
how would we compete in
a particular business
would have a different answer,
depending upon which
business you were in.
This distinction really gets at
the distinction between
business level strategy,
which is focused on competition
and the development of
competitive advantage in
corporate level strategy,
which while also focused
on competitive advantage,
really looks at the
organization as
a collection of
multiple business units
and asks the question,
what businesses will we
be in and subsequently,
why are we in those businesses
and how do those businesses
collectively contribute to
the competitive advantage
of the firm as a whole?
