This course is designed to improve your understanding of current challenges and opportunities in sustainability worldwide. Sustainability is of great interest to multiple stakeholders including customers, employees, investors, regulators and activists. Much of the recent attention to sustainability is attributable to its “business case”, or the notion that businesses can affect positive social or environmental change and contribute to their bottom line in the process. Although this is a powerful notion and one that would benefit society immensely, achieving this symbiotic relationship between business, society and the environment requires a detailed understanding of when, why and how sustainability works. The course will blend theory and practice in a way that emphasizes both critical thinking and experiential learning.

Challenges faced by high-growth companies (start-ups, new ventures, buyouts) differ from those in more established organizations.  This course address the cross-functional elements involved in starting, acquiring, growing, rejuvenating, and harvesting entrepreneurial businesses from the perspective of the entrepreneur, the investors, the employees, the corporate partners, etc.. The focus is not specifically on small- or even medium-sized companies, but on fast-growing entrepreneurial ventures, be they high- or low-tech. The course will help you understand better the various issues relevant to the development of entrepreneurial ventures, be they independent or corporate ventures. Those issues include the business/financing plans, alternative business models, the sources of equity and loan financing, management buy-ins and buy-outs, trade sales, deal structuring, incentive management, etc.

This course builds upon previous Executive MBA courses that deal with (or refer to) behavior of people in organization (Organizational Behavior, ILDI, Decision Making, Strategy). You will work through the challenges of creating workplaces where people can maximize their potential in the context of work and in the interests of various organizational and societal stakeholders. You will examine the leader as a person who sets the ground rules for the expected behavior in the organization and who determines the principles of managing people in organizations. Team based discussions will focus on the structures and tools that are available for realizing the leader’s vision through effective management of human talent in the organization.

A major, but often overlooked, role of executives in organizations is that of being a consulting resource to others in the organization. Typically, in this role we are not managing vertically downwards. Thus, the corresponding standard management instruments – such as delegating responsibility, giving assignments, or forthrightly ordering subordinates to do what we want them to do – are not available. As a consultant in our organization – supporting boss and peers, or generally people outside the vertical line of command – we must rely on other means of influencing change.  This course aims at combining this consulting role with our inherent interest in initiating positive change, focusing on the executive’s ability to consult boss, peers, and other people that either demand our recommendations or that we actively want to influence in the context of organizational change.

In this course, you will deepen your understanding of the processes of technology development and commercialization. The two main objectives are to increase your awareness of the need, purpose and impact of technological innovation, and to raise your understanding of the managerial processes that enable innovation and effective new product development.

Managing innovation is at the core of any company’s strategy. But innovation is a large field, ranging from incremental to more radical innovation, from new products to new business systems, from technological breakthrough to identifying new consumer needs. In this course we focus on what we call strategic innovation. Strategic innovation is the discovery of a fundamentally different position in an existing competitive environment. This new position can be found by identifying and serving new customers (new who), developing new products and/or services (new what), and defining a new way of organizing the business (new how). Often these strategic innovations are based on new technologies, but this is not always the case. The course will help you identify and develop different drivers of strategic innovation, understand how to manage motivation, and to improve your judgment of the organizational impact of strategic innovations.

Strategic International Management is specifically devoted to cross-border aspects of doing busines. With many large companies operating in multiple countries, often there is an international dimension to corporate strategy and management. Questions arise at various levels. You will cover both micro-level issues that are faced by individual managers (for example, cross-cultural management) and macro-level questions faced by firms (for example, why and how do firms go abroad and how do firms compete across borders).

The "bottom of the pyramid" in terms of earnings was until recently considered more a problem than an opportunity, until a number of initiatives proved the potential of this huge pool of individuals which a consumption power that cannot be ignored. Leaving this group out of the economic mainstream is both socially destructive and a waste of opportunities. In this course we investigate two specific initiatives, one aimed at empowering formally disenfranchised groups in a developing economy and one attempting to capitalize on their natural resources, with nice local spillover effects. The objective of the course is to expose you to original thinking about entrepreneurial activities targeting the bottom of the pyramid, and help you translate these to other economic environments.