Strategic Management - Dr. Jeanine Porck, Oklahoma State University

What is your name? My name is Jeanine Porck. Okay, and what is your title and position within management department? so I'm apart of faculty here at the Spears School of Business in the management department, and I am one of the Strategic Management professors. Alright, so what year did you start teaching at Spears? I started teaching in 2016, so I have been here for quite a few years already.

When it comes to Strategic Management, what is that? Do you mind going into further detail, the definition, everything? So with Strategic Management, what we're interested in at a very high level is why do some firms better than others? what is it about their strategy, about their strategic decision making, and the way they implement their strategy that makes them more successful than others? So, when I think about my strategic management class that I teach here at Spears, we're looking in formulating a strategy. How do companies do that? How do they decide on their vision or their mission? How can they think about their culture? All these things that go into coming up with what your goals are, and then we also look at the implementation how do you then achieve those goals? Because, having a plan is one thing, but it seems that some firms are way better at that, then making sure they actually achieve those goals. Then a thing that I think is also interesting is, how do you deal with change? Things happening while you are implementing them, and just think about what happened with COVID-19. Many companies were you know taken aback they had a plan, and then COVID-19 happened and they had to adapt. Some firms did really well, look at Zoom! You maybe never even heard of Zoom but suddenly we were all using zoom and it was very interesting. It's very interesting to look at that company, what did they do? How did they use this opportunity? You know, are they going to stick around? But then there were other industries that were challenged, airline industry for instance. So interestingly, whether you're a company of five people or five thousand, each company has a strategy so they need Strategic Management in order to manage your strategy because your strategy needs to adapt to; what's happening in the industry, what your consumer wants, but also what your competition is doing, what are other firms doing? You need to make sure that you know, you don't lose out and you don't Blockbusters.

When it comes to building a strategy, what do you think are the three main things a company should look at? When building your strategy? Building a strategy, yes. I think companies, what we teach our students is, companies start with like a vision and a mission, they think about what is our vision? What do we want to achieve? What do we need? What is our higher purpose and then sort of our mission? what are we contributing? I think from that comes more strategic goals really about what do we want to achieve in the long term? and What does that mean in terms of the short term? So, I think it's very much goal setting and then thinking about the resources you can imagine a smaller firm or a startup has very different goals but also very different resources to think about than you know a big company.