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xx PREFACE

current strategic-management problems and practices. These are all “student-
friendly” cases.
• Organized conveniently by industry (usually two competing firms per industry),
the cases feature a great mix of small business, international, and not-for-profit
firms.
• All cases have been class tested to ensure that they are interesting, challenging, and
effective for illustrating strategic-management concepts.
• All the cases provide complete financial information about the firm, as well as an
organizational chart and a vision and mission statement for the organization if those
were available.
• Customized inclusion of cases to comprise a tailored text is available to meet the spe-
cial needs of some professors.
• For the cases, the outstanding ancillary package includes an elaborate Case Solutions
Manual and support from the www.strategyclub.com Web site.
• All of the cases are comprehensive in the sense that each provides a full description
of the firm and its operations rather than focusing on one issue or problem such as a
plant closing. Each case thus lends itself to students preparing a three-year strategic
plan for the firm.

Special Note to Students
Welcome to strategic management. This is a challenging and exciting capstone course that
will allow you to function as the owner or chief executive officer of different organizations.
Your major task in this course will be to make strategic decisions and to justify those deci-
sions through oral and written communication. Strategic decisions determine the future
direction and competitive position of an enterprise for a long time. Decisions to expand
geographically or to diversify are examples of strategic decisions.
Strategic decision-making occurs in all types and sizes of organizations, from Exxon
and IBM to a small hardware store or small college. Many people’s lives and jobs are
affected by strategic decisions, so the stakes are very high. An organization’s very survival
is often at stake. The overall importance of strategic decisions makes this course especially
exciting and challenging. You will be called upon in this course to demonstrate how your
strategic decisions could be successfully implemented.
In this course, you can look forward to making strategic decisions both as an individ-
ual and as a member of a team. No matter how hard employees work, an organization is in
real trouble if strategic decisions are not made effectively. Doing the right things (effec-
tiveness) is more important than doing things right (efficiency). For example, many
American newspapers are faltering as consumers increasingly switch to interactive media
for news.
You will have the opportunity in this course to make actual strategic decisions,
perhaps for the first time in your academic career. Do not hesitate to take a stand and
defend specific strategies that you determine to be the best, based on tools and concepts in
this textbook. The rationale for your strategic decisions will be more important than the
actual decision, because no one knows for sure what the best strategy is for a particular
organization at a given point in time. This fact accents the subjective, contingency nature
of the strategic-management process.
Use the concepts and tools presented in this text, coupled with your own intuition, to
recommend strategies that you can defend as being most appropriate for the organizations
that you study. You will also need to integrate knowledge acquired in previous business
courses. For this reason, strategic management is often called a capstone course; you may
want to keep this book for your personal library.
A trademark of this text is its practitioner and applications orientation. This book pre-
sents techniques and content that will enable you to actually formulate, implement, and