Course info

After this course, we expect students to be able to describe:

• The basic tenets of each academic approach to business strategy and how each approach can be applied in real-life situations
• Some of the risks and problems associated with the approach
• The meaning of "entrepreneurship and the concepts that are central to entrepreneurship
• When to seek partnerships with a venture capital firm.
• Competing views on the purpose of leadership and common mistakes in leading
• Myths versus realities on how senior executives lead
• The importance of corporate culture
• Core approaches which research finds are successful in leading a team
• The nature of organizational culture, and how to build and change it
• The importance of failure to create organizational learning and the drivers of work motivation
• The Multinational Enterprise (MNE) Theories, International Competition, and International Strategy.
• The three levels of innovation context.
• The theory that best explains innovation and industry life-cycles.
• The meaning of national innovative capacity.
• The fundamentals of capital structure and the relationship of a company's value to how it is financed
• The Capital Asset Pricing Model, and its uses and limitations
• The basics of agency theory, whereby different groups (like managers and owners) can have different incentives
• The growth in the social impact of nonprofit organizations
• Primary ways that people have limits on their ability to rationally make decisions
• How we can guard against the most common cognitive biases to make better management decisions
• The role of marketing in a corporation's strategy
• How to apply complex systems thinking to social and business environments, to understand phenomena which do not lend themselves to standard tools of financial or economic analysis.