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2024/2025  KAN-CSOAO2402U  Strategic Leadership

English Title
Strategic Leadership

Course information

Language English
Course ECTS 7.5 ECTS
Type Mandatory
Level Full Degree Master
Duration One Quarter
Start time of the course Autumn, First Quarter
Timetable Course schedule will be posted at calendar.cbs.dk
Study board
Study Board for cand.merc. and SOL
Course coordinator
  • Silviya Svejenova Velikova - Department of Organization (IOA)
Main academic disciplines
  • Management
  • Organisation
  • Strategy
Teaching methods
  • Blended learning
Last updated on 04-06-2024

Relevant links

Learning objectives
Upon the courses’ completion, we expect the students to be able to fulfill the following learning objectives:
  • Understand the importance of the fields of economics and organization studies underpinning theories of change, leadership, and strategy
  • Critically relate theories of change, leadership, and strategy to each other
  • Explain the role of narrative, sensemaking, commitment, culture, and identity to leading change and strategic leadership
  • Relate theories of leading change and strategic leadership to business practice in the context of grand challenges faced by business organizations and humanity
  • Discuss how leaders engage with the past and the future to enable collaboration, sustainable transformation, and long-term value creation
  • Connect theories and methods for researching organizational change, strategy, and leadership in the context of a concrete business case study
Course prerequisites
Strategic Leadership can only be taken together with Leading Change as the two courses have a common exam.
Examination
The course shares exams with
KAN-CSOAO2401U
Course content, structure and pedagogical approach

This course introduces the students to strategic leadership and the role senior executives and top teams play in enabling sustainable futures for the businesses they lead, as well as for societies and humanity in the face of grand challenge (e.g., climate emergency, displacement), technological shifts (e.g., generative AI), and geopolitical risks. It engages students in developing understanding of how business leaders can combine marketcompetitiveness and performance with compassion for people and planet (N4), as well as address ethical dilemmas(N5) in highly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business contexts.

 

The course equips students with knowledge of economic and organizational theoretical perspectives on strategic leadership (N1) as well as relates these to business practice. It builds on and extends the students’ prior knowledge of economic perspectives on strategy, while introducing a new – temporality perspective – on strategy in relation to leadership and change. A temporality perspective involves analyzing and discussing top management’s practices and processes for engaging their organizations with and framing the past and the future in ways that create value for different business stakeholders and prosperity across generations (N7).

 

The students will delve into a variety of examples, case studies, and hands-on workshops, as well as have discussions with guest speakers to learn about how business leaders shift or reconstruct their organizations’ past identities while developing strategic narratives for the future as well as how they craft and enact visions of sustainable futures in the present. Further, students will gain insights into the importance of collaborative strategic leadership for value creation through global connections and with local communities (N9).

 

In addition to enhancing students’ analytical skills, the course aims advancing their skills in foresight and framing, enabling them to articulate and critically reflect on sustainable futures in the context of ambiguity (N2) and develop imagination for action towards resolving grand challenges (N3).

 

 

Overlap with the course Leading Change

This course overlaps with Leading Change (LC) in several ways. Both courses focus on theories and conceptual frameworks that elaborate the processes underpinning strategic leadership and change, hereby stressing the active role of organizational actors. They explore concepts such as temporality, narrative, sensemaking/sensegiving, leadership, identity, culture, value, collaboration, and commitment which are particularly pertinent in situations of high ambiguity and volatility as they help framing these situations. The exam and feedback activities for both courses are structured in such a way that constructive collaboration becomes essential whilst constantly honing the students’ critical thinking (N6). Both courses will draw on abductive methods as the foundation for the joint shared student projects.

Description of the teaching methods
The course provides a variety of opportunities for blended learning, among which discussions of articles and cases, role play, and a foresight exercise. There are eight stand-alone SL sessions. Further six sessions are held in conjunction with the Leading Change course.The six sessions feature integrative learning activities that bridge the two courses as well as presentations by and discussions with practitioners from different types of businesses that help students create and reflect on connections between theory and practice.
Feedback during the teaching period
The LC and SL courses offer several feedback opportunities during the class discussions as well as in dedicated activities. Feedback will be given to the group presentations in the class and during office hours. The student groups will also receive supervision and feedback on their exam projects’ progress on two separate occasions. Finally, we create and update a Canvas-based joint archive with selected previous year’s projects and have students comment on their strong points and weakness in relation to concepts from each course and teachers giving feedback to the students’ comments. This allows to better align exam expectations and prepare the students for the oral exam, as some of them have not had oral exams before or, at least, not in English. In addition, in the SL course the students will

1) Submit a short critical and comparative overview of strategic leadership perspectives from the course and relate them to addressing grand challenges. The teacher will provide summary feedback to the class and specific feedback to each group.

2) Design scenarios for sustainable futures on a given case. Student groups will provide comments to each other (peer feedback) and the teacher will give feedback to the class.
Student workload
Teaching 33 hours
Preparation/reading/group work 123 hours
Exam 50 hours
Expected literature

Alvarez, J.L. & Svejenova, S. 2021. Theorizing CXO RolesThe Changing C-Suite: Executive Power in Transformation. Oxford University Press. (online edn, Oxford Academic).

 

Ferraro, F., Etzion, D. & Gehman, J. 2015. Tackling grand challenges pragmatically: Robust action revisited. Organization Studies, 36(3): 363–390.

 

Finkelstein, S., Hambrick, D.C., & Cannella, A.A.. 2008.  The study of top executivesStrategic Leadership: Theory and Research on Executives, Top Management Teams, and Boards, Strategic Management Series (New York, 2008; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Jan. 2009).

 

Howard-Grenville, J., & Lahneman, B. 2021. Bringing the biophysical to the fore: re-envisioning organizational adaptation in the era of planetary shifts, Strategic Organization, 19(3): 478-493.

 

Greve, H.R. 2021. The organizational view of strategic management, in I.M. Duhaime, M.A. Hitt, & M.A. Lyles (eds), Strategic Management: State of the Field and Its Future. Oxford University Press (online edn, Oxford Academic).

 

Grewatsch, S., Kennedy, S., & (Tima) Bansal, P. 2023. Tackling wicked problems in strategic management with systems thinkingStrategic Organization21(3), 721-732. 

 

Harreld, B., O’Reilly III, O. & Tushman, M. 2007. Dynamic capabilities at IBM. California Management Review, 49(4): 21-43.

 

Hatch, M. J., Schultz, M., & Skov, A-M. 2015. Organizational identity and culture in the context of managed change: Transformation in the Carlsberg Group, 2009–2013. Academy of Management Discoveries, 1(1): 58-90.

 

Helfat, C.E. 2021.  The economic view of strategic management, in I.M. Duhaime, M.A. Hitt, & M.A. Lyles (eds), Strategic Management: State of the Field and Its Future. Oxford University Press (online edn, Oxford Academic).

 

Kaplan, S. & Orlikowski, W. 2014. Beyond forecasting: Creating new strategic narratives. MIT Sloan Management Review, 56(1): 23-28.

 

Kornberger, M., Leixnering, S., & Meyer, R. E. 2019. The logic of tact: How decisions happen in situations of crisis. Organization Studies, 40(2): 239–266.

 

Ocasio, W., Kraatz, M., & Chandler, D. 2023. Making sense of corporate purpose. Strategy Science, 8(2): 123-138.

 

Rindova, V.P. & Martins, L.L. 2022. Futurescapes: Imagination and temporal reorganization in the design of strategic narrativesStrategic Organization20(1): 200-224. 

 

Schultz, M. & Hernes, T. 2020. Temporal interplay between strategy and identity: Punctuated, subsumed, and sustained modes.Strategic Organization, 18(1): 106-135.

 

Scoblic, J.P. 2020. Learning from the future: How to make robust strategy in times of deep uncertainty. Harvard Business Review, 98(4): 37-47.

 

Stjerne, I.S., Wenzel, M., & Svejenova, S. 2022.  Commitment to grand challenges in fluid forms of organizing: The role of narratives’ temporality. In Gümusay, A.A. et al. (Ed.) Organizing for Societal Grand Challenges, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 79: 139-160.

 

Sull, D.N. 2003. Managing by commitments. Harvard Business Review, 81(6): 82–137.

 

Tripsas, M. 2009. Technology, identity, and inertia through the lens of "The Digital Photography Company"Organization Science, 20(2): 441–460.

Last updated on 04-06-2024