This course serves the purpose of introducing you to three key components of the Executive MBA program:

• the General Manager’s perspective that defines much of the program content
• the participant-centered approach to our philosophy of learning
• the collaborative, collegial, and professional culture that will help you succeed throughout your studies

This course aims to introduce you to economic concepts and demonstrate how they can be used to better understand the world in which we live. You will learn how an understanding of economics enables managers to approach decision-making in a systematic and consistent way by recognizing trade-offs, incentives that motivate decision makers, and their strategic interactions. You will explore how basic economic concepts have a practical value in business life, and provide an internally consistent conceptual framework for thinking about the interaction between the firm and the market. You will also discuss how governments can influence market outcomes.

In this course you will be exposed to different pitfalls in making decisions based on intuition and introduces models to avoid psychological traps. Several commonly used modelling tools are introduced. You will learn how to create an environment in which good decisions are made. You will work in an atmosphere conducive to creativity, and be assembled into teams to best take advantage of knowledge distributed across individuals.

In “OB”, you will become familiar with the fundamental concepts of behavior in organizations. You will explore frameworks to help structure your experience in dealing with individuals, groups, and organizations in business. The course touches upon dilemmas and challenges associated with the “soft” side of business, and offers lenses for analyzing behavior in organizations and possible courses of action. The applied nature of the concepts learned in this course will help to foresee consequences of your actions in organizations.

Managerial decision making under conditions of uncertainty often requires gathering and analyzing information which is often found in numerical data. You will be introduced to some of the most common statistical tools necessary to organize, analyze and extract meaning from a dataset. But most importantly, this course will provide an overview of some major pitfalls and potential misuses of data description and data analysis. We provide you with guidelines to identify typical flaws in statistical analysis and to critically read and interpret the results from statistical reports before taking major decisions.

In this course, you will study strategies that help organizations build a competitive advantage by superior management of operations and the supply chain: i.e. sourcing inputs, processing them into finished goods or creating service offerings, and delivering them to the consumers. In the first part of the course, you will focus on Business Process Analysis and Improvement. You study tools that allow you to analyze, improve and design internal firm processes to better match supply with demand. You will work on techniques for increasing capacity, reducing costs and improving quality. In the second part, Supply Chain Management, we turn our attention to processes external to the firm and examine the sourcing of raw materials and delivering goods to consumers to better match supply with demand.

This module integrates accounting knowledge with managerial decision making. With a clear focus on information from internal accounting – costs and revenues – you will learn the connections between different accounting figures and decision making in the field of strategy as well as in more operational activities. Based on an in-depth analysis of typical cost and revenue structures, you will take a closer look at several management tasks – e.g. procurement decisions, production planning, identification of price ranges. You will critically analyze different accounting information for decision-making. You will develop your understanding of the possibilities but also of the difficulties of using accounting figures in the managerial decision process.

The objective of this course is to understand how savvy managers make decisions using basic financial concepts, including time value of money, valuation, portfolio theory, asset pricing, and risk and return. In this class you will learn techniques for financial decision-making, including corporate value maximization, financial performance measures and financial planning, capital budgeting and valuation, and corporate financial policy and its impact on overall corporate strategy, in particular in times of economic uncertainty.

Since the central process of marketing is an exchange of goods, services, ideas or monetary currency between market participants, marketing as a function spans across the boundaries of business entities and has an impact on the public image of an organization. A skilled marketer is not just one who understands the value that his organization can deliver to others but also one who understands the needs of others outside his organization. We will plunge into the trenches of organizations to understand the problems marketing managers grapple with while creating and sustaining value exchanges, why they occur, and what one can do about them. Through real cases, you will learn how to develop, recommend and defend marketing strategy decisions based on sound analytical principles.

The primary purpose of this course is to enable you to analyze and design profitable business strategies to obtain a sustainable competitive advantage in the global marketplace. The focus is on developing strategies tailored to the economic environment in which the firm is operating and are consistent with the unique resources and capabilities of the firm itself. A secondary purpose of this course is to develop your approach to business problems and to sharpen your decision-making skills. By the end of this course, when you encounter problems – business or otherwise – you should be more capable of cutting to the essence of problems and formulating robust solutions in a disciplined, analytical way.

In this course you will consider the scope and governance of an entire organization and its direction in a changing, competitive, globalizing world. Some of the broad topics that you will cover include:

• Managing the Strategy Process: How are strategies formulated and implemented? What is the role of general management in shaping strategy?
• Managing Corporate Growth: What are the sources of, and pathways to, corporate growth? What determines the horizontal and vertical boundaries of organizations? When should an organization ally? What sorts of things can and should “headquarters” do to be considered as value-adding as opposed to “overhead”?
• Strategic Leadership: What purposes should corporate strategy serve?

The objective of this course is to provide you with an opportunity to put your managerial knowledge and skills in practice. You will “play” in a situation which mirrors the journey of an entrepreneur. This is done via a business simulation (sometimes also called business game), whereby, as part of a team, you will be handed over a virtual company which you have to manage over 8 to 10 quarters.  Expect to learn (through active participation) about the interdependence of different business functions (such as production, finance, marketing, R&D, etc.), how "context” impacts business, decision-making processes and the impact of time pressure, and about the crucial roles of “cash management”, communication and interpersonal relationships. Finally, learn more about how you operate under the pressure of competition and cooperation.

This part of the Executive MBA program runs through the whole MBA program from the first to the last day. ILDI is dedicated to the development and fine-tuning of competencies related to executive functioning as a leader. You will explore various ways of making a positive impact on people, teams, and organizations while feeling good about doing so. As designers of this part of the program we provide a variety of opportunities to learn how to lead better. As an outcome for you, we envision greater self-awareness, ability to better “read” other people, an enhanced repertoire of behaviors in various leadership situations, and familiarity with various tools for developing self and others. We expect that the outcomes of the course will be helpful not only in a work setting but also in other parts of your life, thus contributing to a better work-life balance and greater agility in dealing with life’s opportunities and challenges.