IIM Calcutta – Advanced Programme in Strategy & Leadership

Increasingly, strategic leadership is becoming crucial in the world of business and in the ever uncertain and dynamic world in which we live and work. The APSL programme is designed for corporate leaders, profit centre heads, and managers aspiring to CXO roles who wish to translate strategy into value-driven decisions and lead their organizations toward sustainable growth. Current business contexts are defined by intense pressures of competition, international exchanges of resources in an uncertain geopolitical order, new concerns about sustainability, an intensification of resource conflicts around the world, technological changes and business disruptions triggered by the use of information technology, and massive institutional transitions such as the rise of new economic powers. These both frame and challenge a firm’s ambitions of growth, requiring leaders to take risks as they navigate through change.

Strategy is a mode of thinking that leverages the power of individuals, institutions, firms and markets in a cohesive manner to improve the effectiveness of an organization. Hence, we can call it the exercise of power. It is a skill and a craft. Strategy is thus fundamentally about governance. Power can of course be sought for its own sake, and crafty strategists in its pursuit may deform and transform business and societal spaces and existing institutions, even while setting ‘new rules of the game.’ This requires institutional work that can embrace the ‘social’ and ‘political’ even as it retains the core concern with the economic calculus of a firm’s strategizing.

Globalization and more intense international flows of resources and ideas are bringing firms nurtured in specific, historically constructed national institutional settings to compete in global markets — all while nations militarize and a multi-polar geopolitical order throws up unanticipated events capable of disrupting resource flows rather suddenly. Understanding the institutional setting of rival and partner firms, so as to better appreciate their strengths and weaknesses, adds an additional layer of complexity to the strategic endeavor in the post-Covid world. Navigating the challenges of global competition therefore requires an appreciation not only of the strategic moves a firm can make, but more importantly, of how these relate to and interweave with the broader institutions that frame and define strategic action.

The APSL programme therefore presumes that strategic action — whether of competition or cooperation — is always embedded in societal, institutional and regulatory contexts. Rather than treating these as constraints, the programme helps leaders appreciate how wins can be crafted and power effectively leveraged by working within and through these broader institutions, to the benefit of both firm and society. Across five modules — spanning strategic thinking and competitive advantage, organizational transformation, leadership and executive presence, AI and digital strategy, and innovation-led growth — participants build the strategic reasoning and enterprise-level judgment needed to lead with confidence in a fast-changing world.