Strategic management is usually among the last courses of the business education curriculum. Taught from a top-management perspective, the course generally involves concepts, cases, and a business game. The balance among the work expected of students in studying concepts and engaging in cases and game vary greatly among institutions and their instructors.This narrative content is written for the strategic management course that is lighter-on-content and heavier-on-engagement. The content herein covers principles that are useful in practice. The student is told only what the student must be told, on the presumption that the student is intelligent enough to fill in the gaps, a presumption that should be reasonable for anyone aspiring to a top management position.To simplify the narrative, the discussion herein refers only to profit-making entities, labeled firms, even though much of the material is applicable also to not-for-profit organizations. Additionally, the revenue-generating output of firms are referred to always as products, even when the product could be a service, such as transportation.

A strategy is a plan with actionable elements. Many strategies fall readily into one of a small number of common types. A type is not a strategy, because a type is not a plan. When a strategy fits into a type, however, the strategy may be immediately assessed as better or worse because of its type.