Core courses and electives

This course is designed to give you an economic perspective on the topics, concepts and analytical tools that you will encounter in other parts of the MBA. You will be introduced to the parts of microeconomics that are especially relevant to management.

Understanding how individuals behave and the relationship between individual and group behaviour and organisational performance are some of the most challenging issues for managers and professionals. This course is designed to increase your knowledge about behaviour and performance within organisations and how these can be influenced and managed.

This course covers the evaluation and funding of investments. The aim of the course is to develop a broad conceptual framework for analysing issues in corporate finance. We will present the basic insights of corporate finance theory and link it to real business decisions. The emphasis is on investment and financing decisions. We address the present valuation of future cash flows, the treatment of risk, and the firm’s choice of financing.

This module is a practical course in coordination design. In this module, you will discover which mechanism, market or firm, makes for more effective co-ordination.

This course is about the way that you interact with others to achieve your objectives. The classic approach to management development, which some of you may have experienced, is to give you tools and techniques with which to influence and control others. Our starting point is slightly different. We assume that before we think about managing others, we must first focus on managing ourselves. There is a long-standing tension in our understanding of how human beings, including managers, relate to the world around them.

The course is designed to help you understand:

• why corporations are required to file financial reports
• how these reports aggregate and summarise a large number of independent transactions
• what corporations have to report for a selected set of core positions in financial reports,
• what financial reports fundamentally communicate to outsiders,
  what their core limitations are,
• how incentives affect certain accounting choices and financial reporting in general, and
• how financial reporting evolves over time to accommodate the demand for a broader assessment of the impact of firm activities.

This module will develop your viewpoint in planning and evaluating marketing decisions.

Examine corporate strategy and different growth options. We look at traditional frameworks you can use to formulate and assess your corporate strategy.

We’ll discuss the arguments for diversification versus trying to achieve synergies. We will also look at strategic failure and the reasons why firms are unable to respond to external threats and strategies for multi-sided markets and then move on to look at the importance of having an ecosystem-driven strategy.

This Digital Business module will provide you with the conceptual tools to understand, analyse and evaluate how to proceed with digitalisation endeavours. We will start by understanding digital innovation and how it may shift an organisation’s value creating activities and ways of engaging with the customer. Then we will analyse how digital platforms have changed strategic and management thinking by organising economic activities differently and changing the way value is delivered to the customer. Finally, we will discuss the organisational and managerial challenges that arise as organisations go through digitalisation, and how successful leaders can help overcome them.

This course will look at negotiations in a more structured way. Students will be given the tools to deal with more complex negotiations which will enable them to move from ‘value claiming’ to ‘value creating’ in their negotiations.

Advanced Strategy offers a forward-looking and integrative approach to business and corporate strategy. It builds on the learnings derived from the Strategy core course to help MBA candidates think as general managers (as opposed to functional managers whose responsibilities focus on one particular area such as finance, production, marketing, human resources, IT, etc.) and make better decisions that will improve the competitive position of their organisation in the long run and create value for its members, clients, corporate partners and other key stakeholders.

In this module you will study techniques which will allow you to limit mismatches in supply and demand. You will also learn about the relationship between emerging technologies and operations management, and how this generates value.

This course provides you with an introduction to macroeconomics, with the aim of giving you sufficient background to be able to make judgements about macroeconomic events and policies, their likely impact on organisations, and to be able to follow and appreciate non-technical commentaries on the macroeconomy and macroeconomic policy in places like the Economist, the FT and the Wall Street Journal.

This course provides an opportunity to analyse, reflect on, and debate the relationships between business and society, thereby developing skills necessary for leading contemporary organisations. Presently, our societies are facing a number of important challenges, and as such many policy makers, investors, and employees are now asking businesses to account for their role in perpetuating and in potentially alleviating those challenges. These challenges include growing income inequality, unequal access to opportunities and basic infrastructure, and increased environmental degradation.

This module will help you make and defend decisions or recommendations, based on data and quantitative analysis. We will teach basic concepts and essential management tools that help you understand and exploit data and structure decision problems to compare decision alternatives in a quantitative way. You will learn key skills that help you perform, defend and critique a business analysis.

This module aims at understanding how individuals behave and the relationship between individual and group behaviour and organisational performance are some of the most challenging issues for managers and professionals. This module is designed to increase your knowledge about behaviour and performance within organisations and how these can be influenced and managed.