This teaching tool site is a repository for materials to help teach strategic management courses to all audiences. Please use the tools freely but don’t forget to comment and rate them so others get the benefit of your experience. Here are a few tips on using the site:

• Search tips. The navigation bar across the top will filter the resources by type (video, exercise, etc.). The categories on the right will filter them all by topic in a strategy course. I expect this will be the easiest way to browse materials for a given strategy topic. Of course, you can use the basic search function to find specific posts. Note that you must click on “Older Posts” at the bottom to see more since only the 10 most recent posts are shown initially (to reduce loading time). We are working on some more advanced search features as well.
• Permissions. There is no commercial motive to this site and most resources are available at no charge. That said, it is possible that some of the resources posted here may be subject to copyright and usage rules. It is the responsibility of the users to seek out appropriate permissions for materials
• How to retrieve YouTube videos. I have converted some videos so they can be downloaded and embedded directly into PowerPoint (in this dropbox folder). It is also possible to link YouTube videos in PowerPoint files. However, then they won’t work if you are not online when presenting. A better solution is to download the video and convert it to a format that can be easily embedded in a presentation. I have found that YouTube Downloader (YTD) is an easy (and free) solution both for downloading and then for converting YouTube videos. Here are a few quick steps to downloading and inserting videos:
  • Install and open YouTube Downloader (YTD)
  • Right click on the video (on this web site) and select “Copy video URL”. Alternatively, you can go to any video on YouTube and copy that URL.
  • Go to YTD and paste the URL and press download (make sure you take note of the download directory)
  • Select the “Convert” tab. Find the “.FLV” (or “MP4”) file in the download directory and select it for conversion. Choose either “WMV” or “AVI” as the conversion format and press “Convert”
  • Go to PowerPoint and select “Insert Video from file” on the “Insert” tab. Find and select the converted file.
• Video insertion and editing. Recent versions of PowerPoint allow you to insert video files and do simple editing (trim or crop the video). This will increase the size of your presentation file by the size of the video. I have also found a free online video editor that does this as well (Video Toolbox). The nice thing about this is that you can trim parts you don’t want to use and embed a somewhat smaller file in your PowerPoint presentation. Of course, there are many more powerful video editors available as well.
• Credit for resources. Mason’s original site did not include credits so, in many cases, I don’t know who contributed resources. Going forward, I will try to include credit and contact information. If you contributed something and it is not credited to you, please let me know and I will correct it.
• Comments Ratings & Discussion. If you have used a given tool, please pause to rate it so others have a sense of how useful it is. You might also reply and give a bit more description of how to use the resource especially if you have additional ideas that are not included in the original post.
• Who maintains this site? Russ Coff is a professor at the Wisconsin School of Business and researcher in the area of strategic human capital.
• Please contribute content. Hopefully the resources here are just a starting point for a strategy teaching community. Please follow the instructions on the <Submit> page to add resources to the toolbox. I will add them as soon as I can.

–Russ