MBA
Professor Gulati has taught required MBA courses on Leadership, Organization Design, and Managing Strategic Alliances as well as several elective courses in his area of expertise: Strategy Implementation and Leading Market Driven Organizations.
MBA Courses
Leadership in Organizations
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.
Organizational Design
Managing Strategic Alliances and Acquisitions
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.
Teaching Awards
Ranjay has received numerous awards for teaching, including the Best Professor Award in Kellogg’s International Executive MBA Program: Kellogg-HKUST (2002–2003), Kellogg-Schulich (2004–2005), and Kellogg-Schulich (2007–2008). He also received the 1998–1999 and 2004–2005 Chairs’ Core Teaching Award while he was at the Kellogg School of Management.