Course Description

This course provides students with a foundation in collaborative leadership and agile strategy. The course brings together theories and insights from a variety of disciplines including engineering, management, psychology, and social science. Increasingly, leaders are being called upon to apply their technical skills in collaborative environments that cut across organizational units and inter-organizational boundaries. Understanding how to design and guide collaborations and apply agile approaches for setting and achieving strategic outcomes is an important skill-set and knowledge-base in the 21^st Century economy, defined more by open networks than the rigid hierarchies of the past. You may find a copy of the syllabus here.

Course Topics Will Include:

• Designing and guiding complex collaborations to drive innovation and strategic solutions
• Applying an agile approach to achieving strategic outcomes
• Thinking differently, behaving differently and doing differently
• Laying the Groundwork for Agile Strategy
• Exploring Strategic Opportunities
• Converting Strategic Opportunities into Strategic Outcomes
• Charting Strategic Pathways
• Making Ongoing Strategic Progress

Learning Objectives: 

Students apply their experiences from undergraduate and graduate courses including work experience regardless of their discipline to achieve an overarching goal of understanding how to successfully design and guide collaborations and to apply agile approaches to problem solving  The successful graduate student learner must be able to:

1. Recognize the elements needed for collaborative leadership and an agile approach to strategy 
2. Gain an understanding of scholarly underpinnings of collaborative leadership and an agile approach to strategy  
3. Apply a collaborative and agile approach to achieving strategic outcomes. 

The course, ENGT 50700, requires students to perform individually and in teams. From time to time, students, working in groups, will be required formally to respond to case studies.

Textbook and Other Learning Resources

The main text for the class is Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership (Wiley 2019). The book is available from most online retailers including Amazon. It is available in hardcopy, Kindle, and as an audio book from Audible. Any of these formats are acceptable. In addition to the textbook, students will be assigned several scholarly articles to read, some of which are compiled into a course pack that can be purchased from Harvard Business Review. More information about the course pack will be available when the course opens.

About Your Instructor

This course was developed by Scott Hutcheson, PhD who also serves as instructor. For over over 30 years, Scott has had one foot planted inside the university and the other outside of it. His first teaching experience came right out of college when got a gig working with a group of adult learners at the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. He was asked to design and teach a course that would help these engineers better communicate and collaborate with one another. He then went on to be a trainer for American Airlines IT division to do similar work. Along the way, he obtained a masters and doctorate degree, landing at Purdue University in 1998. He’s now a faculty member in the Department of Technology Leadership and Innovation where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. His work outside the university is through his company, Hutcheson Associates. Over the years, Scott has worked with over 4,000 leaders from 143 different countries.