Message
Strategy is all about understanding how everything connects. Strategy is figuring out how marketing and HR go together. You can't suck at anything and win, but winning is always relative. Two great teams can always beat each other. One great team can go undefeated. Strategy shares a lot of marketing ideas that have to be external facing. It's moving it in the same direction - In business management and not-for-profit - you really are trying to create value by making sure you do it better than anyone else. If you're going to go out and do fundraising, you have to be better than other fundraising options. In government, it's relative, but if you want to create real value, you have to get the whole machine moving in the same direction. If you're going to create value, you have to to do it better than anyone else.
Strategy is built around the notion that value is created by thoughtfully integrating the separate business functions. The perpetual challenge is creating new combinations of those functional resources and capabilities that manage organizational, customer, and competitive interactions over time. This interaction through time reminds us that the success of any strategic move is largely dependent upon how others react to it.
Biography
Dr. Wiltbank is Contributing Associate Professor of Strategic Management for Willamette University’s Atkinson Graduate School of Management. He is also a former member of the full-time tenured faculty of the school, where he was the founding faculty member of the Willamette MBA Angel Fund and Entrepreneurship course – a course recognized by Inc. Magazine as one of the top 10 entrepreneurship courses in the United States. Dr. Wiltbank now combines teaching with his position of CEO of two companies: Niobium, Inc. and Galois, Inc.
Rob serves as a member of the Board of Directors for several companies and is a Partner with Montlake Capital, through fund II, a Seattle based venture capital fund. He has published two books about entrepreneurship and research in top tier academic journals covering topics from top management teams to non-predictive control strategies, to formal venture capital practices among angel investors.
Robert loves basketball, music, and traveling. He also enjoys spending time with his wife and three children, playing sports, going to church and seeing movies, as well as arguing politics and military strategy, and he plays a bit of Xbox.