Hi. My name is Tobias Kretschmer, and I'm a professor of strategy, technology and organization at LMU Munich. You will enjoy participating in this course both if you are interested in strategic organization design within companies, as well as its link to the greater competitive environment of markets. And you're just one step away from mastering both organization design and its interaction with firm strategies. You ready? Cool then. [SOUND] [MUSIC] Ride on. [MUSIC] So, in this course, we ask ourselves, is your organization truly designed to enable the strategy you have in mind? Will you meet the challenges of firm growth? Well, let's put that to the test right now. Strategic organization design will give you the last piece you need to complete the strategy and organization puzzle [MUSIC] This course comes with all of the cool features and functions you know and love from your prior course here but guess what? We've also introduced a couple of new features for you along the way. And of course to intensify your learning experience, we've designed this course to take place in new and exciting locations. Let me now give you a sneak preview and briefly walk you through the course. So to kick off, we will look at the fundamental elements of organizational structure. What is the intuition behind explicit elements, such as the organization chart? We'll move on to investigate how more implicit governance mechanisms guide the interactions between individuals and the units. Next stop, it's going to get a bit more complex and even more exciting. We will learn to understand the interdependencies between different design elements. We will realize why for example, when designing an organization in a dynamic industry, we should think twice about how much we interfere in our employees' work. And we will see that changing one seemingly small bit [SOUND] can have a greater impact on an organization than we could ever imagine. So how can firms successfully align their strategy and organization design to different environments and goals? We'll think about firms in a competitive environment, where there are other firms doing pretty much the same thing. We will then move our focus to firms which strive to continuously innovate by creating something new. We also ask why and under which circumstances a corporate office should take over corporate decision making. How do firms manage to balance the need for efficiency of corporate choices on the one hand, and detailed information on the other? Then again, environments constantly change. Just think about how traditionally less competitive and even regulated industries, such as the hotel and taxi business, have been shaken up by the rise of platforms such as Uber and Airbnb. So in our final module, we will bring together all we have learned on the planning process, from foundation to maturity of the firm. We ask ourselves what it takes to set up an organization that is both effective in the short run dealing with its immediate environment, but successful in facilitating long term growth. But that's it, enough, no more. I'm giving it all away. Now, it's your turn to tune in and learn the details. Thanks very much, and have fun. [MUSIC]