Core Business Concept

The course gives an introduction into the ethical dimension of management. It will deal with two main questions: a) the role of ethics within an organisational context and b) the role of the corporation within society. Especially in the context of a globalising business environment, these questions are becoming more and more important. The course helps students to broaden their filter of world perception and increases their set of alternatives in organizational decision-making. It also strengthens their capacity to know themselves by introducing them to practices of mindfulness. Self-knowledge is the fundament of effective ethical responsibility in organisations and in society.

This course provides a broad review of microeconomic and macroeconomic principles. Topics include the supply-and-demand analysis of movements in competitive markets, the study of firm behaviour in a competitive or monopolistic framework, an introduction to the interpretation of macroeconomic data, the analysis of long-run and short-run determinants of macroeconomic output, price level and exchange rates, and basic game theory.

At the end of this course, you will have acquired the tools necessary to interpret economic indicators and to understand the economic environment beyond mere preconceptions, allowing you to make better informed managerial decision.

The aim of this course is to enhance your data analysis and model-building skills, but not to transform you into expert management scientists or statisticians. By the end, you should have mastered a set of skills which will enable you to approach a large range of problems in a more structured way.

Equally important, you should become informed and critical users of quantitative tools developed for you by others, whether by in-house specialists or external consultants. You should have gained the confidence to look behind your numbers at the underlying assumptions, and challenge these where appropriate.

Over the past decades, a number of innovative companies have made headlines because of their ability to leverage digital technologies to change how business gets done in their respective industries. While Amazon, Airbnb, or Alphabet each are well-known examples of the digital innovation movement, more and more industries are on the verge of digital disruption. This development is further accelerated by specific characteristics of digital technologies that impact and transform organizations and the environments they operate in.

This course introduces you to the fundamental interplay of disruption, innovation, and transformation in a digital context. Based on a discussion of the unique characteristics of digital technologies, this course provides important insights into the groundwork necessary to prepare organizations for digitalization. This, in turn, will enable you to partake in exploring the potentials of digital technologies and data for various facets of organizational innovation going beyond disruption and automation. The course will also look at ethical and societal challenges in the digital age that can serve as drivers and barriers of new digital business models.

Employing a variety of educational methods – from lecture-based enablement to in-class case work – the course will provide you with foundational analytical skills and conceptual frameworks needed to understand how to leverage digital technologies to drive innovation and transformation.

The purpose of the "Driving Projects" module is to provide the skills and methods to be able to manage complex projects in all aspects and all kind of situations. Projects are basically defined as deliverables to be given in time with the expected quality at the budgeted cost at a client satisfaction. But how to get there? How to mitigate all risks along the path to the due date? How to stay confident over the course of the project? The course will include cases discussion, recent articles, presentations of methods, and group discussions on selected cases. Individual participation with real experiences in projects is mostly encouraged.

The purpose of the entrepreneurship module is to provide you with the essential knowledge required to identify, evaluate and develop new venture projects that create value in start-up/early stage ventures and entrepreneurially-minded organisations. The course integrates many of the disciplines in the EMBA program and we will successively look at the notion of opportunity, the key components of a business proposal/plan and issues related to the development and financing of new ventures or internal organisational projects. The course will include articles, presentations, case discussions, and a group project.

The purpose of the “Empowering Your Team" module is to develop skills and knowledge around managing people in an individual and team context. People are undeniably our greatest resource. But they can also be our biggest challenge. How to motivate and inspire, how to empower…. how to serve? The course will include presentation and application of models and methods, case studies, presentation of current dilemmas and group discussions where the sharing of experiences and active participation is critical.

The finance industry represents a significant share of the gross domestic product, providing a very large number of services ranging from credits to the providing of sophisticated financial instruments to hedge risks. Understanding its logic is central to successfully manage companies.

The goals are to understand the basics of financial markets and trading as well as fundamental notions of finance such as net present value, portfolio allocation, fair return on an investment. We will also discuss why the value of a company may be unaffected by the choice of the debt/equity structure.

During this module, we explore the nature and use of financial reporting for business entities. The underpinning conceptual framework is that of “decision usefulness”; i.e. that the primary purpose of financial reporting is to provide useful information to those who supply funds. The legal and regulatory frameworks within which such information is produced are reviewed, as are the strengths and limitations of published financial statements.

Our approach is based on the following ideas: we adopt a user perspective, rather than a producer one, because most of you will become users of financial statements, internal (managers, executives) or external (investors, analysts, consultants…), rather than preparers of financial statements. 4 Examples will be drawn from companies using either International Financial Reporting Standards, IFRS (used in over 100 countries worldwide) or US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAPP). While some differences exist and will be mentioned, both are based on what we would call Anglo-American accounting principles. National GAAP vary significantly from one country to the other and are beyond the scope of this course.

The content of this course could be described such as: "Leadership is not just about yourself and how you lead others; it is about developing others so that they can self-lead".

This course focuses on the roles of managers as leaders and how leadership is key for individual and organisational performance. You also obtain insights into your leadership style and personality and learn how to improve your leadership influencing abilities.

The course provides an introduction into leading organisational culture and change. These two themes guide the structure of the classes. You work on the topics of organisational culture and design. One thrust of these early classes is that there are strong relationships between an organisation’s culture, its design and its ability to change. You also learn how to use frameworks and tools to develop a systematic approach towards leading organisational change.

Throughout the course, you employ cases that highlight issues of culture and change in both locally and globally operating organisations. The challenges that global organisations face are often more complex versions of similar problems experienced by locally operating organisations.

The principles of leading organisational culture and change apply to for-profit and not-for-profit organisations.

This course familiarize you with the fundamental concepts of marketing related to the management of a company’s offer and its customers, such as the value concept, strategic marketing, customer behaviour, market research, segmentation-targeting- positioning, branding, pricing, and communication instruments.

At the same time, you have insight into and discuss current topics such as consumer emancipation, ethical consumption, hybrid services in B2B, internal branding, and social media as marketing tools in order to enrich the traditional set of marketing knowledge by cutting-edge insights from research and practice. You have the opportunity to apply your acquired knowledge in a real case project.

When is the last time you negotiated?

Your initial reaction may be to look at the distant past when you were involved in a business negotiation with a supplier or customer. In reality, we negotiate multiple times each day with colleagues, spouses, parents, bosses, shop owners, customers and service providers. Determining the deadline for a report, who will write the meeting minutes, what movie to watch and the deadline to be back home from a party are all examples of negotiations.

This course provides the opportunity to develop your negotiation skills thanks to the presentation of some theoretical concepts, a wealth of examples of real-life situations and a number of negotiation role plays. The programme is designed to address a broad spectrum of negotiation problems to let you experience different situations and challenges.

Good negotiators are more satisfied and less stressed at work. A small difference in negotiating and influencing ability can make a huge impact on your results and on your career success. This is your opportunity to learn frameworks and have templates to effectively manage external and internal negotiations, and gain valuable real negotiating practice.

One cannot avoid operations management. Its principles are present in every working environment from the manufacturing of cell phones, to steel production, from insurance company to healthcare, from fire brigade to the making of oil rigs etc. Be it growth or profit driven, large or small business, the very fundamentals of operations management are present.

These fundamentals concern, among many things, the process related measures like cycle time, capacity, throughput, quality and lead time. After starting with the explanation of these concepts and their relationships, we will set up to study various cases to improve operational efficiency in manufacturing and service companies.

One of the most important skills that a person can have today is the ability to present and speak well in public. Businesspeople are called on regularly to make presentations to colleagues, clients and the general public. Being able to do so in a confident and engaging manner will increase the chances of success for the individual and his or her company/organisation.

This course is aimed at familiarising you with key public speaking and providing you with an opportunity to receive personalised feedback.