Hi, guys. Welcome to this new course, Entrepreneurial Strategic Management. Welcome back to those of you've who, who might have taken a previous course with me in global business environment or international business. I invite you to consider those courses if you're taking this this entrepreneurial strategic management course with me for the very first time. This is going to be a fun course. I've taught this course for many years, and really enjoy working through the ideas and the, the concepts. And, and helping people in business. And that's what this course will be all about. It'll be about entrepreneurs, and strategists, and managers, and executives, and those who wish to be in any of those categories, and helping them achieve their dreams, so to speak. So this course is called Entrepreneurial Strategic Management and this is a class that is offered in many business programs. If you've taken a a class on campus or another Coursera course in business, you may have seen a class called Strategic Management or Strategy. And that usually is a course that is focused on general management skills. It often is, is offered perhaps at the beginning or even the end of a business program. And in a business program, if you were going to get an entire degree in business, you might take classes in multiple areas like accounting, operations, finance etc. And you know, each of those is a discipline in business, and helps you prepare for a particular function to perform for your own company, or for a company that you work for. But sometimes in business, you don't have the luxury of thinking just as an accountant or a marketing expert. You don't get to focus just on the operations or the logistics efforts of your business. Sometimes as a, a manager or an executive, and for sure as an entrepreneur, you need to think generally as a, a general manager, I, I like to say. And that's what this course is really all about, strategic management or strategy, is thinking about the entire operation of the business and helping it achieve success overall. Not just helping achieve success in the marketing area. Sometimes in business, if you have some experience, you may have seen that there tends to be what we say in English as a silo effect. Which is that the marketing function doesn't talk to the accounting function. And sometimes they're going at opposite directions from each other trying to achieve even opposing goals. And that's not what a business is about. It's not trying to achieve just marketing or accounting success. And so as a general manager, or a strategist you're going to need to be able to integrate those functions, and think about them simultaneously. Be able to operate in a holistic way. And so how do you do that? That's what this course is in attempt to accomplish, to help you learn how to do that. And so the way I like to approach the course is to try to put it in very simple terms. We're going to focus all throughout this six-week course on understanding a simple question, trying to understand the answer to a simple question. And that simple question is, what is it take for a business to be successful? We might state it a little differently and say, what are the factors that lead to a business' success? If we had an equation and we were trying to determine in this equation or formula what is business success and, and the thing that we were trying to determine were success we're trying to understand the factors that lead to a business success. Perhaps the characteristics, we might say. The situational factors, the determining necessary criteria for a business to succeed. We're going to attempt to try to understand that all throughout this course. And so I look forward to working with you again if you, if you're coming back for a second or third time with me on Coursera. And I look forward to working, especially with those of you who are all over the world, who may not speak English as a first language. I hope that, that I I'm able to speak clearly to you. And I'm also very interested in speaking to those of you who are starting your own business. I believe many of you may have been attracted to the word entrepreneurial in the title, and some of you may be running your small businesses right now. I'm also interested in speaking to those of you who are running or managing, or working in existing businesses, and helping you do so in a more entrepreneurial, or more innovative fashion. So this will be a great course. I welcome you to it. And this will end part one of module one of entrepreneurial strategic management.
