Quote:
Originally Posted by MagicNo.
As Bllomsbury said try some top ones. This is what comes to my mind right away with strategy focus: College Park, Stern, UCLA, Fuqua, Chaple Hill, Wharton, Chicago's Booth.
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I found this list a bit odd. There is a big distinction between a top MBA program that has a strong strategy focus vs. a good research program that places their graduates well in the strategy field.
I agree with Fuqua, probably the best strategy PhD program now IMHO, and Wharton, but none of the other you listed are particularly well known for top strategy people now. UCLA used to be a top strategy place, but their "star" strategy people are all very senior and aren't operating at the volume they used to. Have not seen any UCLA articles in top strategy journals for quite sometime now. (If UCLA is included for people like Rumelt, then why not Berkeley? They've got Williamson and Teece. But just like UCLA, I believe they are also quite senior and probably aren't as active as they used to be.)
Chicago's inclusion seems particularly inappropriate for strategy. Make no mistake, Chicago's PhD program is by no means anything less than ideal, but their approach appeals much more to the "parent disciplines" like economics. I am not aware of ANY strategy researcher coming out of Chicago or currently at Chicago. (The strategy research literature does cite a lot of Chicago scholars, but only in the sense that electrical engineering literature cites a lot of fundamental physics literature). Unless your recommendation is to go to Chicago and become a pure economist / sociologist who then venture into the "applied" field of strategy (not the best approach IMHO), I would not consider it a good advice at all. I suspect, again, your recommendation is based on the MBA reputation more than anything else. In which case, of course Chicago is a top place.
I will include Michigan and Toronto, and Harvard with a warning sign (that their style is very different from the rest of the strategy field, and has a pretty big reputation for inbreeding. that could be good or bad depending on what you prefer). Purdue is sometimes mentioned because the founding editor of SMJ is there, but I personally would not place it as a top program.