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Course Summaries
 | Core |  | Elective course |
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Approaches to Change |
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In this course you will learn some of the major frameworks that help you to understand and manage change.
Starting with the change agent, you explore the skills needed and the types of analysis
change agents use to decide appropriate courses of action. You will develop your skills and learn a range of different strategies for influencing individuals, groups and the organisation.
Change is also considered from an organisational perspective and you will explore how
organisations respond to, resist, initiate and drive change. Your role in understanding and managing the organisation is examined.
By the end of the course you will be able to:
- Understand the main frameworks that describe personal and organisational change
- Identify the role you play in initiating and facilitating change
- Analyse effective and ineffective change interventions
- Choose appropriate strategies to facilitate personal and organisational change
Sample Overview: Approaches to Change
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Change Skills |
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This course reviews the essential skills of a change agent, including:
- Team building
- Communication
- Networking
- Conflict resolution
- Negotiation
- Process skills
You will gain the confidence and self-knowledge to understand which of your current
abilities are helpful and which skills you need to acquire or strengthen. The course helps
you to develop an action plan around your change skills. Although you work in groups, your competence is assessed individually.
Sample Overview: Change Skills
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Corporate Finance |
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The underlying theme of this course is that a business must add value. Those that do not will either be forced to change or cease to exist. The course addresses the questions: What is value, how is it measured and how does a well-run business create or add value? In examining value, you will be introduced to the three basic ideas in finance: the time value of money, diversification and arbitrage.
The course takes a close look at the firm’s primary financial functions – investment policy (which projects to undertake), financing policy (how to finance projects), strategic
management and risk management, and teaches how to determine the value of company operations and investments.
Sample Overview: Corporate Finance
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Data Analysis & Statistical Modelling for Business |
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There is an explosion of data in the business workplace, but very few managers are equipped with the quantitative skills to make effective use of this data. This course develops expertise in a standard set of statistical and graphical techniques, which will be useful in analysing data. These techniques are widely applied in a number of areas of management, including marketing, finance and economics. The course provides a change in mindset from “statistics can be used to show anything” to “statistics provide a methodology to cope with uncertainty” via the art of statistical thinking, that is, the ability to collect, understand and use data. A work-based project is a key part of the course.
Sample Overview: Data Analysis & Statistical Modelling for Business
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Economics in Management Practice (formerly Managers, Markets & Prices) |
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Economic principles are the foundation for many areas of importance to managers – for accounting, finance, marketing, strategy and negotiation. In this subject, we learn about the principles of opportunity cost, of diminishing marginal returns, of understanding interdependence between players in the market and how to structure our strategic responses within these markets. We develop an understanding of the implications of asymmetric information and how this affects the decisions a manager makes on a day-today basis. We also look at the bigger picture in the economy, developing frameworks for understanding the impact of interest rates and exchange rate changes, the link between inflation and unemployment, and why business cycles occur.
Sample Overview: Economics in Management Practice
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IT and Organisational Performance |
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This course emphasises management rather than technology. It helps you understand how information technology can, and should, fit into your overall business plan. The course addresses two key questions: How does information technology help or hinder the profitability of operations? How can information technology support and leverage business strategies? To answer these questions, you will acquire tools and techniques you can use to improve the fit between information technology and everything else in your organisation. You will also examine recent developments in e-business and the nature of networked organisations.
Sample Overview: IT and Organisational Performance
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Law for Practising Managers |
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The course follows a detailed case study that follows the life cycle of a medium-sized enterprise. The case study is designed to be realistic as well as rich in legal issues of relevance to all varieties of enterprise.
The initial focus of the course will be to get students to consider the variety of relationships created by commercial activity and understand the way in which legal principles apply to these relationships. Thus the course will involve relationships among and between:
- Co-venturers
- Managers vis a vis shareholders, stakeholders, employees, consumers and regulators/government
- Ordinary commercial parties dealing at arm’s length
- Citizens (including corporate citizens) and the State
The course will, aside from teaching students the essential principles of law in key areas (as derived from statutes and case law), teach students how to work with legal principles in a practical manner. We will therefore focus on the process of bargaining “within the shadow of the law”, mediation and negotiation and use of extra-legal and self-help remedies as means of managing legal and business risks. The course will also require students to consider the way in which the law interacts with ethical and sound managerial practice.
You will be exposed to legal issues as they emerge in the real world and learn how to be a more informed and efficient user of the services of legal professionals to manage those issues.
Sample Overview: Law & Practising Managers
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Managerial Skills |
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Managerial Skills is a course that addresses many of the skills and attributes regarded as necessary for managers of 2020. We expose you to new skills and approaches that integrate technical and generic competence with the ability to think laterally to solve problems. The course focuses on identifying, developing, and applying managerial competencies to yourself and others in organisational settings. In doing so, the course focuses on you, the manager, and the cluster of people with whom you have regular, frequent, day-to-day contact.
Managerial Skills incorporates a process of 360-degree feedback, which will enable you to collect confidential feedback from your colleagues on how they observe you performing as a manager and a leader. The 360-degree feedback instrument provides a sophisticated analytical tool for you to determine which management behaviours you need to develop to be a skilled practitioner. You will be asked to consider your baseline performance at the beginning of the course and to identify the skills you are developing to improve your performance. The course, therefore, takes a highly practical approach to your learning, enabling you to concentrate on those skills you personally need to develop to enhance your performance. Sample Course Overview: Managerial Skills
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Managing Change |
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This course explores selected theories and concepts of change management. You will
identify the key skills you need to lead and implement change. We explore different
perspectives on managing change, your personal change competencies, how to build
readiness for change, change leadership, action research as a means of driving change,
and strategic change. The course helps you to develop skills in these areas and broadens your competence to help organisations manage change. It uses a mixture of group-based activities, personal reflection and experiential exercises to explore a wide range of topics.
Sample Overview: Managing Change
Sample Overview: Managing Change Online
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Managing People & Organisations |
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This course explores the issues you face in managing people, groups and organisations. We ask such questions as: What is my role as a manager and a leader? What motivates people at work? How does my group function, and how can it be more effective? What impact does the structure and culture of my organisation have on our performance?
Sample Overview: Managing People & Organisations
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Marketing Management (formerly Marketing Principles) |
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This course focuses on the process of creating, communicating and delivering value to
customers with a view to create exchanges that build customer relationships and satisfy
individual and organisational goals. The course objectives are to develop an awareness of major marketing problems faced by a variety of organisations, with an emphasis on sound approaches to addressing these problems. At the end of the course, equipped with a broad understanding of topics such as consumer behaviour, marketing research and marketing strategy, students should be able to create marketing plans, articulate aspects of the marketing mix and develop sound customer-oriented and competitive marketing strategies.
Sample Overview: Marketing Management
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Operations Management |
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Any business or organisation is concerned with delivering value to its customers or clients. A company’s ‘operations’ are the direct processes that it uses to create value. These involve transforming various types of inputs into outputs. Operations management is the task of managing these processes.
Each company or organisation will have a unique set of operations. This course is
concerned with the fundamentals of operations management, covering both service
industries and manufacturing. The aim is to give you a set of frameworks and concepts you can use to understand the operations functions and strategies of any company.
The course examines the processes at the heart of operations management and ways of
achieving excellence. It also looks at the supply chain; both the control of inventory and the way in which coordination between supply chain partners can be achieved. The course ends with the investigation of operational challenges involved in managing projects.
Sample Overview: Operations Management
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Redesigning the Organisation |
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This course focuses on the important structural and cultural elements of an organisation’s design, when and why the elements might need to be redesigned and how to redesign them effectively. We consider changes at the level of individual jobs through to strategic options such as mergers, downsizing and restructuring. There is no one perfect design, only an optimal design for each particular time and context.
By the end of the course you will be able to:
- Describe the main features of organisations
- Assess an organisational design in relation to the strategy and the environment
- Apply an open-systems perspective to planning for change
- Identify appropriate interventions
Recommend ways to improve the redesign process
Sample Overview: Redesigning the Organisation
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Strategic Management 1: Detecting and Selecting Business Opportunities |
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The Strategic Management Year (SM Year) is the capstone program of the MBA (Executive). The design of the SM Year is organised around the general manager's fundamental problems, and arranged to reflect the different stages of the organisational life cycle.
Detecting and Selecting Business Opportunities is the first of the four subjects in the SM Year. The course is constructed around four specific problems faced by the manager in the early stages of a business:
- How do I formulate a successful strategy?
- How do I position the organisation to compete?
- How do I sell a business plan to potential investors?
- How do I evaluate the level of risks associated with a proposed business?
The course seeks to provide opportunity for you to explore the answers to these questions, and to develop self reflective team working and communication skills. Additionally the SM Year explores four themes across all four courses:
- Economic Logic Formulation
- Entrepreneurship
- Leadership
- Decision Making
Sample Course Overview: Strategic Management 1: Detecting and Selecting Business Opportunities Part A
Sample Course Overview: Strategic Management 1: Detecting and Selecting Business Opportunities Part B
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Strategic Management 2: Developing Business Opportunities |
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The Strategic Management Year is structured on the organisational life cycle, including start up, growth and decline phases. The key questions that students will consider are:
- How do I detect and select business opportunities?
- How do I develop business opportunities?
- How do I grow a business?
- How do I transform a business?
This course focuses on the second key question, i.e. how to develop business opportunities. Students will learn about different organisational architectures, and how to decide which architectures are most appropriate for different business opportunities. Students will consider organisational arrangements required to successfully implement strategies, as well as organisational arrangements required to generate new strategic alternatives.
Sample Course Overview: Strategic Management 2: Developing Business Opportunities
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Strategic Management 3: Growing Businesses |
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Growing Businesses is the third of the four subjects in the SM Year. The course is constructed around four specific problems faced by the manager in the middle stages of a business:
- What options for growth do I have?
- How do I implement a growth option?
- How do I sell a growth plan to internal and external stakeholders?
- How do I evaluate and manage risks associated with a proposed growth option?
Sample Course Overview: Strategic Management 3: Growing Businesses
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Strategic Management 4: Transforming Businesses |
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It is rare for a company to be able to prosper and grow over an extended period of time without having to reconsider the very fundamentals of the business that it is in.
The fourth course in the SM Year addresses how a General Manager can respond to performance risks generated from a lack of external fit that might already exist or be likely to exist in the near future. The risk to external fit can come from any one of a number of sources: regulation, buyer power, technology, competitors, supplier power etc. Responses to these threats have to be substantive and are made under extreme uncertainty.
When external fit is at risk it is likely that the business model will need to be re-examined and redefined, leading to transformational change. At the end of this course you will be able to:
- Recommend a transformation strategy for an organisation
- Develop a plan for the implementation of transformational change
- Evaluate and manage the risks associated with a proposed transformational change
- Facilitate your organisation’s ability to renew itself proactively through identifying and interpreting weak signals in both the external and internal environments.
Sample Course Overview: Strategic Management 4: Transforming Businesses
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Systems for Change |
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This course examines how you can sustain change in yourself and your organisation and teaches you the skills to support both processes. You will learn the four-step action research method:
- Implement change
- Study and reflect on outcomes
- Design new interventions
- Continually assess the effectiveness of your actions
The aim is to become competent in using an open-systems model to understand how organisations function. You will learn to analyse the extent to which systems enable and motivate sustainable change. About one-third of the course is devoted to applying skills to a current, action research project at your workplace.
* GCCM students must have successfully completed the prerequisite course, Approaches to Change
Sample Overview: Systems for Change
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