Leadership - Daniel Salvagni

Internal Analysis and Competitive Advantage

The fifth course of Strategic Leadership and Management Specialization from the University of Illinois on Coursera, Business Strategy, is taught by Deepak Somaya, Professor of Business Administration. This course is about how organizations can create, capture and maintain value and how it’s fundamental for sustainable competitive advantage.

In the third module of the course, we learned about internal analysis and competitive advantage. How to understand the origin and consequences of the unique internal strength of a firm, using the analytical viewpoint of activities, resources, and capabilities.

In my opinion, Business Strategy was one of the best courses in this specialization with real case study analysis as assignments after every module. Both the content, methodology and the professor were great and I could enjoy taking the classes. The assignment for this module I shared in another blog post.

Business Strategy: Case Study Analysis of Starbucks’ Competitive Advantage

As I mentioned in a previous post, Business Strategy: Soft-drinks Industry Analysis, I’m taking the fifth course, called Business Strategy, of Strategic Leadership and Management Specialization from the University of Illinois on Coursera. This course is taught by Deepak Somaya, Professor of Business Administration.

These assignments demand a couple of hours to get it done, due to the amount of information and analysis that is needed. However, it gives you amazing insights while analyzing real cases and practicing what you just learned.

Business Strategy: Soft-drinks Industry Analysis

I’m taking the fifth course, called Business Strategy, of Strategic Leadership and Management Specialization from the University of Illinois on Coursera. This course is taught by Deepak Somaya, Professor of Business Administration.

This is a four-module course, one module per week, and at the end of each module, we have an assessment: to write a case study analysis about a given topic. In the first week, I had to write a hypothetical memo to the CEO of Uber, suggesting a new mission statement. The second week, that I just finished, I had to write a hypothetical memo to Warren Buffet to suggest to increase or decrease the investments on Coca-Cola Company. Both assignments were hard to write and demand a considerable amount of time to get it done, and, the first one I couldn’t get it right in the first attempt and had to resubmit my assignment. For the second one, I’m now waiting for a review of my peers. Anyway, I think it would be good to share it here to gather some feedback if it might occur.

Everyday Leadership

Foundations of Everyday Leadership is the very first course of Strategic Leadership and Management Specialization from the University of Illinois on Coursera. It’s taught by professor Gregory Northcraft which also teaches the following course Applications of Everyday Leadership.

This first course really gives you a ground base of leadership and its challenges. The most important thing from this first classes was to get an overview of different types of leadership, how to make individual and group decisions and how to manage motivation. I’d like to share my notes about it.

Managerial Decision Making

Early this year I decided to focus my studies on the leadership & management sides of organisations, and I enrolled for Strategic Leadership and Management Specialization, a specialization from the University of Illinois on Coursera. I found the courses really complete in terms of content and recommended material, and, so far, these courses gave me a great background on topics such as the foundations and applications of leadership, group decisions and fostering decision, conflict management and so on. When I took Designing the Organization: From Strategy to Organizational Structure, I thought it would be far from what I’d like to learn at this moment, however, it helped me to understand why organisations are designed in the way they are. I’m currently in the 4th course of 7, called Managing the Organization: From Organizational Design to Execution where I’m currently learning about effective organisational decision-making. This is such a great topic that worth to leave my notes with kind of a course summary here.