The primary focus of this course is for top-level executives who provide strategic leadership to business organizations. Students will learn about the roles, functions, and responsibilities of leadership to learn the administrative requirements of leadership. In addition, you will be introduced to the analytical skills and social and personal characteristics of highly effective leaders.

Case studies, videos, and other media will be used to explore these and related issues.

Here’s your introduction to the process of creating a market-driven organization. Specific course topics will include marketing strategy, market research and analysis, and the development of products and services, pricing, distribution, and promotion. The course employs lectures, classroom discussion through threaded discussion forums, case analysis, and field research projects.

Today's business environment forces executives to use every tool at their disposal to create and maintain an effective and adaptable organization. A major source of effectiveness and adaptability is the way in which the company's efforts are organized—its systems, structures, management process, rewards, and strategies.

The primary job of senior management today is to design, build, and operate organizations that function effectively. What this means is that the organization is in a constant state of change. Understanding the change process is vital. Knowing the roadblocks to effective change is very important. The role of the manager as a change agent becomes critical. Often the problems arise not from the change itself, but the process of making the change. Individuals resist change. It is a natural phenomenon. How and why this change manifests itself is a central issue in this course. Developing the skills to move through the change process not knowing what roadblocks one might encounter is becoming incredibly valuable.

The purpose of this course is to provide you with an in-depth exposure to the theory of industry structural analysis and to gain practice in its application. You will learn how to use the competitive forces model for interpreting the strategic implications of evolutionary and revolutionary shifts in industry structures.

This course will cover the key concepts and frameworks related to International Competitive Strategy. As such, the focus will be on the Multinational Corporation (MNC) and on the international managers responsible for its success. MNC managers must understand the broad content of global and cross-border management to achieve success.

The purpose of this course is twofold. Initially, you will be introduced to the basic elements of organizational design, including but not limited to organization structure, administrative processes and systems, size, and product-market complexity.

Then you will learn how these other elements can be configured into a range of designs alternatively suited for the demand of different strategic, environmental, and technological conditions.

These two areas of learning will prepare you for designing organizations that can adapt to the shifting competitive forces of virtually any organizational context.

Building and managing a global talent pipeline is the single most critical leadership challenge in today's global business environment. In this clinic, we will introduce you to current issues and practices in talent management. Our course will examine in-depth practices launched at the C-Suite level and by Boards of Directors to meet these challenges. This clinic will allow you to directly discuss these issues with senior corporate leaders and Board members who have been intimately involved in the global talent management process.

An Action-Learning philosophy guides the operations of the course and students will be given several tools to assess development practices in their company and to better understand opportunities for developing their global leadership skills.

In this course, you’ll survey the management of operations in manufacturing and service firms. Students will work through diverse activities, such as:

• Determining the size and type of production process
• Purchasing the appropriate raw materials
• Planning and scheduling the flow of materials and the nature and content of inventories
• Assuring product quality
• Deciding on production hardware and how it gets used

You’ll also learn that managing operations will require both strategic and tactical skills. The topics considered include:

• Process analysis
• Workforce issues
• Materials management
• Quality and productivity
• Technology
• Strategic planning

The course makes considerable use of business cases. Most classes will be spent discussing the cases assigned. For each case, students will be asked to review actual company situations and apply technical and managerial skills to recommending courses of action. Most cases will be taken from manufacturing, but some will be service-oriented. Several of the cases will focus on international companies or challenges.

This course offers an introduction to tools for strategic management. It provides an introductory review of the complexities involved in determining long-term strategies. Rather than assessing a firm's environment in terms of broadly defined opportunities and threats, you will:

• Examine the dynamics of the competitive environment. 
• Learn how both the pace and direction of industry change are influenced by the resources, capabilities, and competitive interaction of rivals. 

The course uses discussion forums, team projects, and an interactive simulation.

In developing the foundations of the entrepreneurial mindset, this course explores issues such as:

• Making sense of opportunities in the context of changing goals
• Constantly questioning one's “dominant logic” in the context of a changing environment
• Revisiting “deceptively simple questions” about what we think to be true about markets and the firm

Game Theory has traditionally been a tool of economists, but its use in management situations has been growing rapidly in recent years. This trend is sure to continue.

Managerial decisions are not static and cannot be made in isolation. Instead, a manager must account for the reactions of both rival firms, subordinates, and superiors. Game theory is a tool to use to examine these interactions.

The ultimate aim of the course is to strengthen your ability to think strategically in business situations, rather than to teach you facts or theories. To achieve this aim, we will iterate between theory and practice. We will use both formal case studies and real-world examples to sharpen our strategic thinking skills.

Those who operate in the global business environment need more than an understanding of international trade and economics. Some of your biggest challenges will come from explicating and defending your choices to key constituents—to your own internal boards and unions as well as external groups that represent the environment, local governments, and foreign business and government organizations.

No business today will implement a new significant global program without wide buy-in. Inasmuch, this course will require you to directly confront and interact with these myriad groups as they develop and modify their best international business strategies.

You’ll learn to appreciate the full range of benefits afforded to society by globalization while understanding and dealing directly with the negative side-effects. While it is important to see the beneficial sides of globalization, the true value of the course will come when you are able to integrate into your decision-making a more complete understanding of the positive and negative impacts.

This will be a very challenging experience requiring you to do self-directed research into the current experiences of real companies as they outsource, export, import, and build business assets abroad. You will engage in a significant amount of research, strategic analysis, writing, as well as evaluating the proposals of other teams.

This course provides a forum for the in-depth examination of select issues involving the strategic management of technology and innovation.

The course is designed around six learning "modules:"

1. General management and technological innovation
2. Technological pioneering
3. Disruptive technologies
4. Strategic decision making under uncertainty
5. Corporate entrepreneurship
6. Venture planning

Please note that this is not a course about information technology, the Internet, or any technology in particular. Rather, this is a course about management. The focus is on enabling you to better understand some of the unique implications of rapid product-market and technological change for the effective practice of management.