What I Didn't Learn in Business School

What lessons do you learn from Justin’s experience in terms of the limits of some of the core strategy frameworks you learned in theory (examine for example, Michael Porter’s Five Forces and the challenges Justice faced in applying it, value chain analysis, the Resource Based View)

As senior director, Ken McCombs states, “You can use a hammer exactly the way it’s designed to be used, but instead of building something beautiful or durable, you can build a pile of junk. It’s not the tool, it’s how the tool is used; it’s the skills, interests, and motives of the person using the tool that determine whether the outcome of an analysis is reasonable.” (Barney 53). It’s in the use of the tools that create an effective strategy. In business strategy courses, this term strategy is used in a variety of ways and it true definition is often watered down. Justin has a difficult time throughout the book adapting his understanding of business concepts to their real-world application. This seemed to be a theme of the book that Justin uncovers as he continues on his journey with HGS. According to Justin, the more valuable and difficult to imitate activities, the more likely those activities would contribute to a firms core competencies as seen within the VRIO framework (81). By being able to do this shows a huge breakthrough point for Justin because towards the beginning of the book, he was struggling to determine whether core competencies allow firms to expand and navigate through new potential markets. As the book progresses, it starts to show how Justin is now able to determine what the real definition of core competency is as well as other concepts he had learned in school. “Core competence wasn’t just a buzz word for Justin now. VRIO or the other concepts was no longer just a lecture he has heard but are now tools that can be used to examine real-world strategies” (81). He can now apply the knowledge acquired from school and apply those concepts to everyday business...