Industry-specific resources on strategy

I advise you approach this in a savvy way. Yes, there is plenty of content online to read but its just going to overwhelm you. 

Broadly, industries can be classified as follows:

1. Raw Materials- e.g. mining, agriculture and fishing
2. Manufacturing e.g. cars, planes, steel
3. Support services e.g. hospitality, teaching and nursing.
4. Digital Service e.g. IT, Software, Cloud

Read up trends in these industry categories to have an idea or deep dive as required. There will be plenty of commonality across industries and variations by industry. Any company that operates in any industry will have following layers:

• Customers they sell to (B2B or B2C)
• Channels to sell to those customer (e.g. retail, online etc)
• Product & Service to sell through those channels to the customer
• All underlying processes
• Data to enable the processes
• Technology/Tools to execute the processes
• People & Organisation
• Physical assets (offices, warehouse, stock etc)

Hi there,

I have a list of 20+ industry deep-dives that I provide as part of my coaching.

 Stern, Darden, and Columbia casebooks also have fairly good industry overviews (overviews, not deep-dives)

That said, you learn best by doing

I have an industry deep-dive template which lays out the key items that matter when researching an industry. I then have my candidates go and research the industries themselves, leveraging this template, in order to best learn.

Some key tips:

1. List all the major industries that you'll need to learn
2. Create a template that you can fill in with research. This would include things like
   1. Industry summary
   2. Cost drivers
   3. Revenue drivers
   4. Major trends
   5. etc.
3. Fill in the template for each industry one by one. Use google to find the relevant information and piece it together. Over time, you'll get more and more efficient as you see which sites are good for what

Definitely a good idea to partner with someone equal to you! You can each research an industry and present it to each other.

I concur with Ian that HBS / Yale / INSEAD / LBS / Kellogg / Wharton and others have case primers which also include sections on the structure and value chain of many different sectors. These are great as a primer!

Other than that, if you can get access to expert reports (from friends at uni / work), these will also have primers on the sector. Often these are what consultants use in the market research phase of a project. For instance, Telegeography for the telecoms sector across the world, IBISWorld for all sectors, Mintel for consumer/retail, Gartner for technology, Euromonitor for consumer/industrials/FS, Technavio for tech....

These are usually very expensive $2000+ but free via Bloomberg (some) or through business schools

Hello!

Which industry in particular, so we can better direct you?

Cheers, 

Clara