10 Foundational Courses

Effective Managerial Communication

In this course, students will be able to appropriately apply a broad repertoire of communication skills in business, professional, and social contexts.

The course scrutinizes and analyses managerial communication skills required for leadership in various industries. It considers the varied means of communication - writing, speaking, calling – and appearing professionally. The communication requirements of different contexts are studied, including informational, persuasive, and relational forms of communication.

Course videos, readings, and case studies prepare students for group discussions and assignments supporting learning outcomes.

Business Leadership and Strategy

This course examines how leaders can most effectively use the resources of their team members to achieve business outcomes. The course develops managerial and leadership competencies, focusing on how key improvements in the general strategy and techniques of managing people can produce outcomes more significant than isolated improvements to employee performance.

The course provides students with concepts to support them across their careers as they continue developing effective delegation, management strategy, and engagement with people inside an organization.

Business Negotiations

Test and improve negotiation skills through model negotiation scenarios. Managers require a broad array of negotiating skills to implement business solutions - this requires an advanced knowledge of negotiation models, the competence to select the right strategy, and the tactical skills to achieve desired outcomes through negotiation.

In addition to studying key negotiation theories, the course develops skills in negotiation, providing participants with the opportunity to test and improve their abilities through group discussions that model negotiation scenarios through the use of case studies, reflection and feedback.

Students will review and try out various approaches to negotiated conflict resolution (at small personal scales and large organizational scales). The course builds competencies in developing an effective professional and personal negotiation style.

Reflective Leadership

In this course, students will deepen and cultivate their capacity to reflect continually on their learning and growth; they will examine the ways in which their behaviors and decision-making impact others, with a goal of leading with integrity.

This course is designed to deepen and extend students' conceptual and practical understanding of organizational leadership, extending beyond applying knowledge in practical judgments that achieve business outcomes to embrace wider social and ethical considerations. The experiential and multidisciplinary course requires participants to reflect on the social and ethical responsibilities of leaders in relation to their own experiences. It is designed to help students discover insights about themselves as leaders, fostering the development of self-awareness, including strengths and opportunities for personal growth.

In addition, the course provides a context for enhancing the skills and competencies that enable a student to become an effective leader in today's highly dynamic, diverse, and adaptive organization.

Business Accounting, Finance, and Economics

This course covers core accounting, finance, and microeconomics concepts relevant to running a business.

The course begins with finance for business, including the time value of money, the trade-off between risk and return, and arbitrage. It gives managers a strengthened knowledge of finance that can be applied in their professional careers. The topics covered include how to move cash flows in time, the methods and principles of capital budgeting, the valuation of bonds and stocks, how to characterize risk and return, and options pricing with applications to managerial decisions.

The course then builds on the student's knowledge of finance to introduce accounting and examines the subject from the viewpoint of users external to the organization.

Topics include transaction analysis, the accounting cycle, financial statement preparation, use, and analysis; revenue recognition and cost measurement; present value; and problems in financial accounting disclosure.

This course concludes with microeconomic theory and its application to problems faced by managers. Topics include supply and demand, consumer behavior, pricing when a firm has market power, and the role of contracts.

Business Marketing and Operations

This course explores the key marketing concepts and how they fit into the larger context of management strategy and operational decisions. It presents the practical and fundamentals of marketing activities in light of contributions from behavioral science, economics, and statistics.

The course provides managers and business leaders with the understanding needed to manage and lead those who implement marketing activities; the course provides concepts and processes for business leaders who seek to continue developing through future experiences or coursework in marketing.

The course then focuses on managing processes. Theoretically, it models business functions as a network of actions that convert inputs into outputs. Process design is considered, including the volume and variety of system inputs and outputs - especially with respect to goods and services.

Different inventory management and logistic systems are explored. Finally, forecasting and process optimization are explored, strengthening managers' ability to operate with finite resources.

Integrative and Strategic Thinking

In this course, students will gain the capacity to understand how firms work in a global context, incorporating a broad, future-oriented, systems-based approach that incorporates data, information, and insights from diverse perspectives and sources.

This course is designed to convey the key concepts of strategic thinking and how they fit into the larger context of management strategy and decisions. Students will be presented with both the practical 'how' and the fundamental 'why' in light of contributions from behavioral science, economics, and statistics.

Creativity and Innovation

In this course, students will develop specialized and multidisciplinary capacities to generate creative solutions and alternatives to existing business issues.

This course is designed to introduce and deepen the student's ability to lead processes that stimulate and manage creativity in a business.

Students will reflect critically on templates and methods for designing, implementing, and assessing processes that introduce creativity to real work situations. The course will engage with theoretical frameworks and practical methods or tools for cultivating creativity practices in response to real business challenges.

The course cultivates skills for autonomous managers to lead creative projects, people, and ventures and to oversee the processes that keep them on track.

Evidence-Based Decision-Making

In this course, students will strengthen their capacity to lead individuals, teams, and organizations in processes that generate solutions to problems, insights into customer behavior, and data-driven decision-making.

This course provides the foundations of probability and statistics required for a manager to interpret large quantities of data and to make informed decisions under conditions of uncertainty, with incomplete information, and in both structured and unstructured settings. Theoretical topics include decision trees, hypothesis testing, multiple regression, and sampling.

Working with Others

In this course, students will deepen and extend their ability to create and maintain high-quality relationships with people who come from a wide range of backgrounds and possess different points of view in order to create and execute processes that produce successful outcomes and results.

This course teaches business managers and leaders to reflect critically on concepts from the behavioral sciences that can be applied to a fast-changing business environment to improve their abilities to lead and manage in organizations.

Behavioral frameworks for individuals, teams, and organizations are evaluated critically and discussed in the context of real-world cases. Tutorial groups provide practice in problem-based teamwork, communicating in specialist and non-specialist registers, and applying the frameworks in practice.

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3 Advanced Courses

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Implementation and Product Introduction

This course provides students with advanced methods needed to understand how a product will fit into a competitive market and how to introduce the product into that market. This includes advanced research on the receptiveness of a market to the new product, as well as strategies for defining and finding the market that will be most receptive to the product.

Students consider product introductions with the goal of what Marc Andreesen called ‘product/market fit' - a 'good market with a product that can satisfy that market.'

The course trains students to reflect upon and analyze a company's go-to-market strategy, and it provides students with sophisticated methods of calculating customer acquisition cost, determining customer break-even, and calculating customer lifetime value.

Inspiration and Product Creation

Gain advanced abilities in defining the core customers for a new product or entrepreneurial venture. This course provides students with advanced methods and frameworks for understanding customer needs and translating those needs into a program of research and product development that can be used to create a successful new product or service.

It equips students with skills to generate new product hypotheses, research the potential of a new product or entrepreneurial venture, and adjust the product offering to fit customers' needs. This module instills the all-important distinction between a 'bright idea' and a 'business opportunity' in new product creation.

Measurement and Product Adoption

This course examines iterative product development as a method for improving customer adoption and retention. Students will gain a mastery of iterative product development as a strategy for

(a) transforming market research into potential solutions,

(b) testing hypotheses about product improvements and

(c) gaining validation for product adjustments.

Students will gain a comprehensive understanding of the concept of a minimum viable product, how to test the market in the early stages of product adoption, and the benefits and weaknesses of incremental product improvements.

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Students will gain an advanced understanding of customer segmentation, cohort analysis, and churn to learn from market responses to product changes, increase customer retention, and expand customer adoption.