1.1. What You Will Find in Our Lessons and How They Work

Dear users,

Welcome to our online lessons in strategic management in small and medium-sized businesses. By way of these lessons, we would like to offer you – owners and managers of small and medium-sized businesses - the opportunity to learn how to create and implement a business strategy for your current or future business.

Our online lessons will teach you the following:

1. How to divide your company into a system of various types of strategies. The ability to view your company as a system of multiple strategies will allow you to systematically address the often complex strategic reality of your company when formulating your strategy. This will also come in handy in the other lessons. You will also find out which aspects of your business should be addressed by individual strategies - that is to say, what the content of individual strategies should be. This will help you decide which of the recommended strategies are suitable for your company (on the basis of its size, history, line of business etc.) and how to implement them. See: Lessons 3, 4 and 6.

2. Formulating selected strategies should be done using strategic information as a way of balancing out intuitive decision-making, something that is commonplace in small and medium-sized businesses. In our other lessons, we explain how to systematically carry out a strategic analysis, a fundamental component of strategy formation. See: Lesson 5.

3. In order for the strategy to be efficient, the company must abide by it in its daily operations and monitor strategy fulfillment. Recommendations on how to systematically implement and monitor your strategy can be found in our other lesson 7.

4. The final section of our online lessons is aimed at the strategic management of family businesses. This section provides recommendations for family businesses on how to handle specific strategic issues – especially strategic intergenerational succession. (Lesson 8).

Study the lessons in the suggested order

For maximum efficiency, especially for those unfamiliar with strategic management, we recommend studying the individual lessons in the order they are presented in the E-learning portal.

What you will find in each lesson:

• Fundamental lessons that will teach you how to manage your company strategically

• Practical examples and suggestions

• Interesting facts about strategy and strategic management - as supplements to the main text

• Practical and thought-provoking questions about various aspects of strategic management in your company

• As well as a couple of cartoons to add a little bit of light-hearted fun to the serious and demanding reality of small and medium-sized businesses.