UCLA Chair in Business and Society, global leader on strategy

Afternoon Master Class:
‘Strategic Diagnosis and Actions’ (November 28, 2.30-5.30pm)
Presentation:
Keys to Good Strategy in Volatile Times (November 30, 1.30pm)

Richard Rumelt is the Harry and Elsa Kunin Professor of Business & Society at UCLA , a graduate school of business and management. He was voted to be one of the “Top 50 Business Thinkers” in the world (rank 20 in 2011) by the Thinkers50 program, sponsored by the Harvard Business Review and McGraw Hill. His teaching, research and consulting focus on competitive strategy, the nature of competitive advantage, industry dynamics and general management.

He is the author of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy–The Difference and Why It Matters. This book was chosen as one of six finalists for the 2011 Financial Times & Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. He is also a co-author of Fundamental Issues in Strategy–A Research Agenda and the author of Strategy, Structure, and Economic Performance.

He has been a consultant to numerous firms, non-profit organizations, the Department of Defense and several governments. He earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley. He studied decision sciences and corporate strategy at the Harvard Business School, receiving his doctorate in 1972.

He was on the faculty of the Harvard Business School, with two of those years spent on assignment in Tehran to found the Harvard-sponsored Iran Center for Management Studies. In 1976 he joined the UCLA faculty. During 1992-96 he was on long-term leave from UCLA, serving on the faculty at INSEAD, France. At INSEAD, he headed the Corporate Renewal Initiative, a research/intervention center devoted to the study and practice of corporate transformation.

His keynote will introduce the concepts of “good” and “bad” strategy and explain the logic underlying each.

• “Bad Strategy” is long on goals and visions and short on presenting a coherent set of actions for actually solving the fundamental problems facing an organization.
• “Good Strategy” flows from an honest diagnosis of the situation and from a focus on overcoming a critical challenge. Couples problem-solving policies to proximate objectives which the organization can actually accomplish.