Read any industry with the disciplined eye of a strategist. You will learn to identify the structural forces shaping profitability, defend your analysis with evidence and contribute more credibly to strategy, investment and leadership decisions.
Meet the course lead and explore the practical focus, learning experience, and professional value of this course.
Enroll in this course →Reading the Competitive Landscape is a two-week applied micro-course in industry-structure analysis. It teaches Porter’s Five Forces as a method of strategic judgement rather than a diagram to complete. Participants choose a real industry at the outset and carry it through both modules, assessing one force at a time against the structural conditions that drive it.
Five Forces is among the most widely recognised frameworks in management and among the most weakly applied. In practice it can become five headings with unsupported ratings and no view on which force actually determines what an industry earns. An analysis in that form cannot be defended in a board paper or support a serious decision about entry, exit, pricing or investment.
This course closes that gap by requiring a completed analytical artifact. Each section explains one force or extension of the framework, demonstrates the assessment against evidence and then hands the work back to the participant. By the conclusion, participants will have tested their structural verdict against observed industry performance, examined complements, structural change and segmentation, and translated the analysis into a defensible strategic recommendation.
Most strategy courses stop once participants can name the five forces. This course goes further by teaching how to assess the structural determinants beneath each force, support every judgement with evidence and identify which forces genuinely control long-run profitability. Participants apply the method to one real industry across both weeks, test the resulting structural verdict against observed performance, examine complements, structural change and segmentation, and finish with a strategic recommendation they can explain and defend. The framework is also taught with its documented limits, because knowing where an analytical tool stops is part of using it responsibly.
You select a real industry in the opening half hour and apply every section to it across both modules. The result is a completed structural analysis of a market you genuinely need to understand, supported by a published quality rubric rather than a generic certificate exercise.
Each force is assessed through the specific structural conditions beneath it—barriers to entry, sources of supplier and buyer power, functional substitutes and rivalry dynamics—so conclusions are grounded in evidence rather than impression.
The course explains what industry structure can and cannot determine, examines the documented limits of the framework and shows what complementary analysis is needed. Knowing where a tool stops is part of using it competently.
Define the competitive arena, establish a defensible profitability benchmark and assess the five forces against the structural conditions that drive them.
You will learn to define an industry on product and geographic dimensions, establish an appropriate profitability benchmark, assess each of Porter’s five forces against named structural determinants and evidence, and identify the forces controlling long-run profitability.
Test and extend the structural verdict through profitability evidence, complements, change and segmentation, then convert the diagnosis into strategic action while recognising the framework’s limits.
You will learn to test a structural verdict against observed industry returns, trace complements through the five forces, distinguish structural change from the business cycle, segment an industry where competitive conditions differ, derive an actionable recommendation and state the limits of the analysis.
Dean of the School
Dr. Jeffrey Henderson is Dean of Monarch Business School and Professor of Business Ethics, with senior management and advisory experience across commercial real estate, finance, and professional services. His career includes leadership roles with Bentall Capital, Brookfield Properties, KPMG Canada, and other international organizations, involving projects exceeding $6 billion. He brings MMI participants an applied perspective on strategic judgement, ethical leadership, organizational responsibility, and the translation of management ideas into credible professional action.
Meet the accomplished professionals who successfully completed their doctoral studies in 2025, bringing deep leadership experience and rigorous scholarship to Monarch Switzerland.
Meet the accomplished professionals who successfully completed their doctoral studies in 2025, bringing deep leadership experience and rigorous scholarship to Monarch Switzerland.
