MBA

The course is designed to prepare students to lead high-performing, successful firms in the future and to effectively lead your own career.

A key leadership task is to assemble the skills, talents and resources of individuals and groups into those combinations that best solve the organizational problem at hand. Leaders must manage people, information, and processes to accomplish organizational goals; you must make things happen, and often not under conditions or timeframes of your own choosing. Leaders must also understand how to introduce their own skills and abilities into their teams. The successful execution of these goals requires leaders to be able to diagnose problems, make effective decisions, influence others, manage the diversity of their personal contacts, tap the human and social capital of organizational members, optimize cross-functional teams, and drive organizational change.

This course prepares students to achieve these objectives by providing fundamental tools from the behavioral and social sciences that will improve your ability to analyze organizational dynamics and to take robust action.

This course is concerned with building high performance systems to deal with the number one problem facing organizations worldwide—how to be more competitive in a global marketplace. It focuses on organizational level concepts such as organizational design and organizational culture. This course reflects a dual focus on practice and theory: requirements combine substantial reading, analysis, and assignments with opportunities to apply basic concepts and analytic approaches to a series of actual business and other organizations. The course focuses on problem diagnosis and problem solving around the major challenge managers face—how do you build high performance organizations? Specifically, the course will help the manager better understand: The behavior of organizations which includes how to better design organization units so that they are more productive.

In these turbulent times of global competition and industry structural change brought about by de-regulation and technological shifts, firms are looking beyond their own boundaries to access resources and capabilities. A record number of alliances and acquisitions are making headlines and prompting questions about which ones will ultimately create value and which ones will end up destroying it.

Acquisitions are frequent across all industries. These transactions create new opportunities for managers to create competitive advantage. They also can create great disadvantage if managers do not develop and adhere to a highly disciplined strategy of adding value from day one and implementing a plan for future growth.

Acquisitions and alliances bring with them stress for the organizations and their employees. They affect the jobs of all concerned, not just senior management. With the likelihood that employees will experience at least one alliance or acquisition during their work life, top managers need to equip themselves with alliance and/or acquisition negotiation skills and post alliance and/or acquisition management skills.

In this course, I provide a set of tools for superior strategic analysis to identify and manage such transactions effectively. I also develop negotiation skills, and then explore how firms manage the organizational challenges of these transactions. I conclude by articulating the key elements of alliance and acquisition management capability.