STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT FOR BUSINESS: COURSE SYLLABUS
Fall 2014
Instructor: Steve Ballmer

Classroom: Stanford, Room 666
Office: My 300-room mansion on the top of a mountain
Office Hours: I’ll be available to students when the Microsoft App Store is a success
Contact Info: Kiss my bald head

Description: This course will provide business students with the knowledge and skills to plot the course of an enterprise, especially in how to navigate a product’s journey from inception to complete and utter disaster.

Organization: This is an unconventional course, in that there are actually no complete lectures. Instead, utilizing something called the Longhorn method, Professor Ballmer will start each lecture passionately, suddenly stop and postpone it indefinitely, and then return to it weeks later when everybody is past caring about it.

Course Objectives:
1.) To teach students on how a business can develop its own product line by copying from others, borrowing only the worst ideas and leaving the good ones behind.
2.) To introduce students on the best practices for ignoring technological trends (i.e., the emergence of the Internet) and scrambling to keep up with them when vastly behind the times.
3.) To acquaint students with the notion of being complacent when a business has reached a certain level of success and to prepare students on how to properly underestimate one’s competitors.

Grading Plan: Much like the historical practices of Microsoft, Professor Ballmer’s class will enforce the use of stack ranking. As a result, despite all actual grades, a guaranteed 10 percent will fail, and another 70 percent* will need to plead with Professor Ballmer for a passing grade at the end of the course.

* More than likely, the “adequate” 70% will become students at other universities and become more productive in those environments.

Required Supplies (one of each):
Surface RT
Surface Pro 1
Surface Pro 2
Surface Pro 3

Course Topics:
How to Reduce Costs by Reducing Market Share
Keep It Stupid, Simple: You Have to Spend Money to Lose Money
Pull a 360: How to Make Your Business Go in Circles and Never Really Go Anywhere
The Key to Marketing Is Confusing Commercials
Everybody Loves a Bully: Lose Respect in Your Industry by Being Hostile to Collaboration
Developers, Developers, Developers
Go Clippers

Classroom Rules of Conduct: Students are encouraged to be belligerent and assertive when participating in discussions. Any sign of weakness will not be tolerated, and those offenders will be sent to the corner of the classroom and forced to wear the Kin Beanie as punishment.

Suggestions for Success:
Professor Ballmer says “When it comes to making big decisions, just do everything in the opposite way that I did…oh, and remember to make friends with people on your dorm floor.”

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.

1.) Not only do you not have a QA machine, but your production environment has been nicknamed by everyone as “the vaporware” and has bets placed on it to eventually beat the record of Duke Nukem Forever.

2.) You are supposedly only a few weeks away from the alpha, and you’re still interviewing people for your team.

3.) When you look at the scheduling system for all employees, you see that the majority of management has scheduled vacations around the supposed release date. More importantly, due to the excruciating pain which it has endured from morons, you see that the project has gained sentience and scheduled some vacation for itself, booking a week-long stay in Aruba.

4.) When you return to the operations floor, you observe that the devops team, the sysadmin team, and the network team are still pointing guns at each other in a Mexican standoff…just as you had left them six months ago.

5.) Metaphorically, even though your company is standing on a beach and facing an approaching tsunami wave of destruction, your various directors still insist on planting flags in the sand and arguing over who has jurisdiction over the greatest number of shells. (And when the eventual happens, they will probably use your body as a flotation device in order save their own ass.)

6.) Management finally decides to deal with the low morale and the high rate of employee turnover, and in an effort to help with the problem, they install a revolving door on your floor.

7.) Near the beginning of the project, your boss would occasionally buy pizza as lunch or dinner for the team. However, with the looming release date, your boss has proclaimed eating as “wasting precious time”, and instead, he starts to liquefy all bought pizza and prep it in enlarged hamster bottles that are hanging in each cubicle. “Drink and work, my little hamsters! Hurry!”

8.) Your belated launch of the release candidate went surprisingly well (as customers have lined up for preorders), but your payment system currently only accepts Bitcoin. When you ask the eCommerce team about credit cards, they sadly shake their heads, but they do promise that the next iteration will accept Beaver Bucks from Hustler’s.

9.) The sysadmin group is starting to wear so many different hats that they’ve taken the more practical route of mounting a hat rack to their heads. (I know that you admins love the puns!)

10.) Even though the release date is just a few weeks away and your project is clearly headed for disaster, your company throws an impromptu celebration for all of your hard work, providing all the grape Kool-Aid that you can drink and some really comfortable pillows.

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.