Course Description
1. Uncertainty, Data and Decision Making
The goal of this course is to provide a solid foundation in
probability and statistics to make critical business decisions in the
face of uncertainty. After all, most management decisions are made under
conditions of uncertainty. So you will need a framework for thinking
about problems involving uncertainty and, building on this framework,
some
tools
for interpreting data. These are precisely the tools and frameworks
that this course provides. This course also focuses on the behavioral
aspect of judgment and decision making. How do people make decisions?
What are the common pitfalls of managerial decisions?
Research
shows that people rely on a small number of heuristics in making
decisions. These heuristics are extremely useful: they are fast, easy
and they get us close to the right answer most of the time. However,
they can also lead to serious mistakes. While intuition often serves us
well, there are many decision traps that we tend to fall into on a
repeated basis. The goal of this course is to help participants learn to
make better decisions by improving their understanding of the workings
of the mind.
2. Financial Reporting Systems
This course introduces generally accepted accounting principles and concepts and trains students to analyze
financial statements.
Accounting is the language of business. Understanding how accountants
decide what information to report, how they aggregate it and the uses to
which it can (or cannot) be applied is one of the fundamental building
blocks of any business education. Hence, a significant component of this
course is about taking basic textbook knowledge and applying it to
interpret real world corporate financial statements. You will learn to
be a critical user of financial statements and develop sensitivity to
the managerial assumptions, policy choices and soft estimates that are
embedded in a firm’s reported figures.
3. Microeconomics of Competitiveness
This course prepares students to diagnose the determinants of an
industry’s structure and formulate rational, competitive strategies for
coping with that structure. Ultimately, it is the prices paid and
charged by a company that determine how economic value is divided
between the business, its consumers and its suppliers. This course
teaches you how to use structured thinking based on microeconomic theory
to understand how economic fundamentals such as demand, cost, market
structure and government policy shape the prices that prevail in a
market. By the end of the course you will know how to: construct a
fact-based, logically grounded analysis of a competitive market;
identify the categories of costs that are relevant for critical business
decisions; construct models of how government interactions affect
prices; make proft-maximising price decisions based on the interplay
between cost and demand.
4. Macroeconomic Analysis and Public Policy
The course focuses on the effects of fiscal and monetary policies on
GNP, interest rates, unemployment and inflation. Individuals, companies,
governments and international organizations all operate within an
economic environment that influences their performance. In order to
minimize the risks and to capitalize on opportunities arising from
macroeconomic conditions, companies must constantly monitor changes in
interest rates,
exchange rates,
monetary/fiscal policy, inflation, unemployment and phases of the
business cycle. The goal of this course is to build your understanding
of these mechanisms and the way they determine the evolution of the
global economic environment.
5. Business Law and Legal Environment
This course is intended to help students attain a basic understanding
of the Pakistani legal system, particularly as it relates to business
organizations. The thrust of this course is to introduce legal concepts
and reasoning that the student can apply in a business context. Students
will engage in practical application of legal concepts in order to
develop skills that will aid them in the business environment. The
course will benefit all students in the field of business by developing a
broader base of legal language and concepts that are encountered in the
everyday business world.
6. Corporate Finance
Following the financial innovations of recent decades, modern
corporate finance has become a highly complex area of expertise. Hence
this course, which consists of three parts. The first provides you with
an introduction to basic derivative securities, in particular options,
futures and forwards. The main focus is on understanding how these
instruments are priced, and who trades them and why. The second part
covers the application of
options pricing to corporate finance. It gives you an insight into real options, the valuation of
convertible
securities, executive stock options and risk management. The third part
gives you a grounding in the traditional topics of corporate finance:
financing policy (beyond the Modigliani-Miller theorem), pay-out policy
(dividends versus share repurchases) and investment policy (the special
case of mergers and acquisitions). The material is analytical and you
will need a working knowledge of basic mathematics and statistics.
7. Financial Strategy
The key to creating corporate value is making
good investments
(e.g. R&D or acquisitions). It is therefore critical for firms to
ensure they have enough cash to undertake these investments. This course
will demonstrate how firms can optimally coordinate their investment
and financing policies in order to avoid giving up attractive
investment opportunities. The strategies that will be discussed include building a cash buffer, setting up a
risk management
program and designing new corporate securities. The emphasis will be on
understanding these schemes and the reasons behind their potential
success or failure, and on how to implement them to maximize shareholder
value
8. Consumer Insight and Marketing Strategy
This course addresses three key areas: brand management, channel management and social media
marketing.
The course focuses on customer-centricity, creating innovative
frameworks, developing strategic perspectives toward the company’s sales
force, and implementing effective marketing programs in service
sectors. Imagine you want to start your own business and need to sell a
new product or service. First you must understand the market you are
going to be operating in. How big is it? Is it growing? Who are the main
players? What is the competition like? But this knowledge is not
helpful without a second step: understanding how potential customers
make their choices and how to segment them into different groups. Third,
you must develop your long-term marketing strategy by choosing a target
segment and defining the benefits of your product or service for these
customers. Fourth, you must make your tactical decisions about how to
communicate, deliver and capture the customer value. Finally, you have
to monitor performance continually. These steps are at the heart of
marketing management and will be the focus of this course.
9. Production and Operations Management
This course examines the basic principles of managing the production
and distribution of goods and services. The course approaches operations
as a managerial integration function and provides frameworks and tools
to target and implement improvements in business processes. Businesses
create value by supplying products or services to satisfy customer
demand. But the inflexible nature of both supply and demand can lead to
costly mismatches between them resulting in unsatisfied customers or
wasted resources. In this course, you will acquire techniques to limit
the occurrence and the impact of such mismatches and thus gain a
competitive advantage for your organisation. The course has two parts.
First, in Business Process Analysis and Improvement you will study tools
and case studies that enable you to analyse, improve and design
activities within the company. Second, in Supply Chain Management you
will turn your attention to the external environment: sourcing raw
materials and delivering goods to the customers.
10. Crafting Strategy for Competitiveness
Why are some companies consistently successful, while others are left
behind? What can executives do to drive performance and growth in the
face of intense competition, uncertainty or even radical industry
disruption? This course explores some of the critical challenges you’ll
face as a manager designing the course for your organisation. The focus
will be on identifying the key drivers of persistent superior
performance in different settings – and using that understanding to
formulate better strategies. The course is structured into three parts.
The first looks at business unit strategy and introduces you to the key
concepts of competitive strategy with which to conduct industry
analysis. The second covers developing strategy – with a special focus
on value innovation and the challenges/opportunities arising from
external competitive dynamics and internal organisational dynamics. The
third is about corporate strategy in firms with multiple business units.
The course will also focus on the analysis of businesses facing
strategic challenges that require reassessment of strategic direction
and business model, such as those facing new competition, technological
disruption, or industry restructuring.
11. Ethics and Leadership
This course examines the role of the CEO and other top leaders in
modern organizations, highlighting their ethical challenges and
exploring the implications of a variety of ethical frameworks to
facilitate more effective complex organizational decision making in a
rapidly changing business environment. This course applies cutting edge
findings from psychology and organisational behavior to issues of
leadership. As managers and leaders, the ability to handle interactions,
both one-on-one and in small groups, far outweigh any other technical
skills. What has been missing, and what this course will emphasize, is
how to translate those research findings into practical tools, changing
how things are done. The course is designed to provide you with concepts
and competencies in four areas: individual effectiveness, emotional
intelligence, leadership effectiveness, and team performance. The
concepts will include both time-tested ideas and very recent findings,
putting you at the cutting edge of management thinking. You will also
have the chance to practice and experiment with these ideas. Through
class exercises, videotaped exercises and cases, you will have the
opportunity to turn the concepts into competencies.
12. Managing People in Organizations
The purpose of this course is to increase your effectiveness and
skill in observing, understanding and leading behavior in organizations.
It is a class in applied behavioral science, which takes ideas and
frameworks from psychology, social psychology and sociology and explores
their implications for leadership and managerial practice. The course
provides a diagnostic framework for understanding and managing complex
organizations. Sessions cover issues such as: communication in
organizations; the role of individual differences in explaining
behavior; influence in a group setting; giving and receiving feedback;
managing work; negotiation; and leadership.
13. Accounting for Management Planning and Control
This course is an introduction to the use of accounting information
for internal planning, decision- making and performance evaluation. The
main objective is to equip you with the knowledge to understand,
evaluate and make practical decisions on the many financial reports used
in modern companies. An internal accounting system serves two
fundamental purposes. First, it supports decisions about products,
processes, assets and customers. Second, it plays a key role in
providing incentives to managers at all levels and evaluating their
performance. This course focuses on both and reveals that many companies
have failed to provide their managers with useful information in the
past. You will discover how a managerial-accounting system should be
designed and the mechanics of the many techniques used to prepare
management reports.
14. Managing Innovation and Technological Change
The purpose of this course is to experience the innovation phenomenon
and to better understand the managerial and organisational challenges
that innovation invariably generates. The course will examine various
sides of innovation management. This is highly applied course and focus
on innovation within business entities, from the typical technology and
product innovation programs, to broader, process, marketing and other
forms of innovation. It provides concepts and frameworks to help
understand the interaction among firm strategies, technologies and
markets. Students act in the roles of key decision-makers or their
advisors and solve problems related to the development or maintenance of
the competitive advantage of the firm in a given market. The course
will address innovation as a holistic strategic management imperative
not limited to Research & Development or New Product Development.
15. Managing Organizational Politics
In this course, students will explore the dynamics of organizational
politics and discuss techniques for managing power in and around
organizations. The course teaches students how to recognize politics, at
work and in society, and how to use power as a force for change.
Throughout, the emphasis is on developing skills at recognizing and
using power in order to be more effective managers and citizens. The
coursework focuses on increasing a student’s ability to analyze,
explain, evaluate, and utilize power dynamics in and around
organizations. A theoretical understanding of power and politics in and
around organizations is a necessary but not sufficient
step
in developing real competency in managing power and influence. Students
also need to apply these concepts to their own experiences and to those
of others. This course will encourage that application through
discussion of actual cases, by viewing videotaped examples of power and
influence processes, and by discussing past experiences with power and
politics.
16. Management Communication
In this course, business leaders are prepared for the communication
challenges of the workplace, regardless of current skills or managerial
level. Students learn the essentials of presentation, stakeholder
communication, and persuasion. They also gain confidence in public
speaking and receive individualized feedback from instructor. The course
enables students to develop and demonstrate effective,
business-oriented communication skills.
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