Most strategy documents fail not because the analysis is wrong, but because nobody stress-tested the plan against the numbers. A team maps the competitive landscape, draws a strategy canvas, feels confident — and then discovers the projected returns do not survive a simple discount-rate calculation. The fix is a repeatable workflow: assess the industry, map the strategic options, then value the chosen path. That is exactly the workflow the Executive MBA / DBA — Strategic Business Management course on asibiont.com is built around.
This article walks through that workflow as a one-week exercise you can run on your own company. It is the same sequence of tools the course teaches: Porter's Five Forces for industry attractiveness, a strategy canvas and Blue Ocean Strategy for finding uncontested space, and DCF valuation with WACC for stress-testing the plan.
What the course is and who it is for
The course is an executive-level program in strategic business management, positioned as the equivalent of a top business school Executive MBA. It is written for people who make decisions with money and people attached: CEOs, business owners, and top managers who need frameworks they can apply on Monday morning, not academic theory for its own sake.
The curriculum spans ten business disciplines, each treated as a working toolkit:
- Strategic Thinking — Porter's Five Forces, Blue Ocean Strategy, and the Resource-Based View (RBV)
- Financial Management for CEOs — DCF, WACC, and CAPM
- Leadership & Culture — Kotter's change model and Situational Leadership
- Marketing Strategy — STP (segmentation, targeting, positioning), brand equity, and customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Operational Excellence — Lean and Six Sigma
- Corporate Governance — board structure, SEC proxy rules, ESG and CSRD reporting, shareholder activism
- Innovation & Digital Transformation — Disruptive Innovation theory
- Global Strategy — the CAGE distance framework and the AAA (adaptation, aggregation, arbitrage) framework
- Negotiations — the Harvard Negotiation Project approach and BATNA
- Capstone — a full CEO business simulation
Step 1: Is this industry even worth competing in?
Before asking "how do we win?", ask "is this a good game?" Porter's Five Forces is the standard diagnostic. It looks at five sources of pressure on profitability: rivalry among existing competitors, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes, bargaining power of suppliers, and bargaining power of buyers.
The practical output is not a list of five headings — it is a scored map. For each force, rate the pressure as low, medium, or high, and write one sentence of evidence. For example: "Threat of new entrants: high — capital requirements are modest and no regulatory licence is needed."
The value shows up in the disagreements. When a management team scores a force differently, that gap is usually where the strategy is weakest. Porter's original framework was published in Harvard Business Review in 1979 ("How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy") and refined in his 2008 HBR piece "The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy" — both worth reading in the original.
Step 2: Map the strategy canvas and look for a blue ocean
Once you know how attractive the industry is, the next question is where to position. Blue Ocean Strategy, developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne (Harvard Business School Press, 2005), offers a visual tool: the strategy canvas.
The canvas plots competing factors on the horizontal axis and the level of offering on the vertical axis. Plot your company and two or three competitors as curves. Where all curves cluster, you are in a red ocean of imitation. The goal is a value curve that diverges — raising some factors, reducing others, and eliminating or creating factors nobody else offers.
Kim and Mauborgne's four-actions framework makes this concrete:
- Eliminate — which factors that the industry takes for granted should be removed?
- Reduce — which factors should be dialled down well below industry standard?
- Raise — which factors should be lifted well above industry standard?
- Create — which factors should be invented that the industry has never offered?
A classic illustration is Cirque du Soleil, which eliminated animal shows and star performers, reduced the thrill-and-danger element, raised artistic production, and created a theatrical narrative — appealing to adult theatre-goers rather than only children's parties.
Step 3: Stress-test the plan with DCF and WACC
A strategy that cannot survive a discount-rate calculation is a story, not a plan. DCF valuation (discounted cash flow) projects future free cash flows and discounts them to present value. The discount rate is typically the WACC (weighted average cost of capital): the blended cost of debt and equity, weighted by capital structure.
The mechanics are simple enough to run in a spreadsheet:
- Forecast free cash flow for five to ten years: operating profit after tax, plus depreciation, minus capital expenditure, minus the change in working capital.
- Estimate a terminal value — often a perpetuity growth model: final-year cash flow × (1 + g) ÷ (WACC − g).
- Discount every cash flow and the terminal value back to today at WACC.
- Compare the result with the investment required. If the present value is below the cost, the strategy needs rethinking before it needs a launch party.
WACC itself has two components. The cost of equity is usually estimated with CAPM: risk-free rate plus beta times the equity risk premium. The cost of debt is the interest rate adjusted for the tax shield. A change in either assumption can swing a valuation substantially — which is precisely why the exercise is worth doing.
| Input | Where it comes from | Sensitivity to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Free cash flow | Management forecast | Revenue growth and margin assumptions |
| WACC | CAPM for equity, after-tax cost of debt | Beta and risk-free rate |
| Terminal growth | Long-run GDP or inflation expectations | Should not exceed long-run growth |
| Investment | Capex and working capital plan | Timing of cash outflows |
How learning works on asibiont.com
The course is delivered entirely in text format, which matters more than it sounds. Text is searchable, skimmable, and revisitable — you can return to a framework mid-decision without scrubbing through a video. Access is 24/7, so a manager can study around a board meeting or a late-night valuation review.
What makes the format different is the engine behind it. Lessons are generated by AI and personalized for each student: the neural network adapts the program to your level and goals, explains complex topics in plain language, and builds practical assignments around the frameworks. If a concept like CAPM does not land the first time, the explanation can be reframed rather than repeated.
This matters for a subject like strategic management, where the audience is uneven. A founder with a finance background needs a different entry point into Porter than a marketing director moving into general management. A fixed curriculum serves the average; a personalized one serves the person.
Who benefits most
The course suits people who already carry decision responsibility and want a structured toolkit:
- CEOs and business owners who need to connect strategy to valuation
- Top managers preparing for general management roles
- Functional leaders — finance, marketing, operations — moving into P&L ownership
- Founders who want a repeatable process for competitive analysis
- Consultants and analysts who need frameworks they can defend in front of a client
If you are looking for a purely academic treatment, this is not it. The orientation is applied: every module produces a tool you can use immediately.
A one-week walkthrough
Here is how the workflow fits into a working week:
- Monday — run the Five Forces analysis on your industry and score each force with evidence.
- Tuesday — plot a strategy canvas with two or three competitors and identify where the curves cluster.
- Wednesday — apply the four actions (eliminate, reduce, raise, create) to sketch a divergent value curve.
- Thursday — build a simple DCF of the proposed strategy, using WACC as the discount rate.
- Friday — run sensitivity on the two or three assumptions that move the valuation most, and write a one-page decision memo.
By Friday afternoon you have something most strategy decks lack: a plan that has been tested against its own numbers.
Why this matters now
Competitive analysis has become cheaper to fake and harder to do well. Industry data is abundant, but the discipline of scoring forces with evidence, mapping value curves honestly, and discounting cash flows properly is still scarce. The professionals who can do all three are the ones who get trusted with capital allocation.
That is the case for structured executive education. Not a credential on a wall, but a repeatable process you can run on your own business in five days — and defend in front of a board.
If you want to build that process, start with the course: Executive MBA / DBA — Strategic Business Management. Pick one real decision you are facing, work through the three steps above, and let the personalized lessons on asibiont.com take you from framework to decision.
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