Courses
This course refines students’ skills in business writing, public speaking, and interpersonal communication. Through analyses and practice of communication strategies adopted by successful business professionals, students learn to write clearly and concisely, deliver compelling presentations, and construct effective arguments.
This course provides students with the foundational knowledge and skills needed to negotiate. Designed around a series of research-based negotiation exercises, the course exposes students to a variety of negotiation situations that help them to understand two fundamental approaches to negotiation. By reflecting on these exercises in light of negotiation theory, students develop an awareness of their personal negotiation style, including its strengths and weaknesses. By the end of the course, students will be able to negotiate in an effective, ethical, and culturally appropriate manner.
This foundational course develops students’ capacities for ?understanding themselves as moral agents in a complex environment of competing values and often ambiguous ethical challenges inherent in business. Through a rigorously discursive exploration of human moral capabilities, value systems, ethical frameworks, and contemporary ethical dilemmas, students clarify their personal moral compass and develop a toolkit of knowledge and practices for sound ethical leadership in business and society?.
A thorough working knowledge of the legal and regulatory environment in which businesses operate is essential for well-prepared business executives. This course provides an overview of the legal and regulatory environment affecting business in the United States. Topics include forms of business organization, contracts, torts and product liability, intellectual property, constitutional law business transactions, and discrimination and employment issues. Students are expected to utilize electronic library and Internet resources to complete assignments.
Leadership requires a deep understanding of human behavior – how we make sense of the world (or fail to do so), how we make decisions, what brings us together and what sends us apart. Good leaders understand the power of motivation, the benefits and challenges of groups and how to create a context in which others will thrive and perform at their best. The goal of Leadership and Organizational Behavior is to help students leverage knowledge of human behavior to enhance their overall effectiveness within organizations and their ability to lead. This course will provide students with analytical frameworks and practical experience designed to help them put learning into action, whether or not they are currently in a formal leadership role.
The goal of Leadership in Organizations is to help students learn how to leverage organizational behavior to enhance their ability to lead. Specifically, this course seeks to provide students with both the analytical frameworks and the practical experience necessary to better lead individuals and groups in organizations. The analytical frameworks will help students to understand leadership; the practical experience will help students put that understanding into action. The aim is to help students lead, even if they do not currently find themselves in a formal leadership role. The practices that are discussed will promote effectiveness at any level.
This course is a leadership-intensive seminar and developmental workshop designed to provide foundational experiences, relationships and conceptual frameworks for students who have been accepted into the Center for Innovative Leadership Fellows program. The course uses an experiential learning approach in which students are immersed in a variety of activities and challenges and provided with repeated opportunities for guided reflection and feedback. Students will engage both as leader and follower many times throughout the course. They will build a deeper conceptual understanding of leadership behaviors and skills, practice and hone their own leadership capacity and develop a plan for their ongoing leadership development, particularly as they engage in the Fellows program. In addition, the course provides an opportunity for students to build strong working relationships with one another that they will continue to foster throughout the Leadership Fellows program and beyond.
Developing and managing human capital is vital for the success of any organization. In this course, students will examine ways in which human resources management can be used to enhance organizations’ competitive capabilities. The goal will be to understand how an organization can select, train, and retain the right employees, and how it can effectively motivate them to make decisions that will allow the organization to successfully implement its overall strategy. Students will explore and master topics such as hiring and layoff decisions; human capital and on-the-job training; turnover; the provision of incentives; the advantages and disadvantages of alternative compensation schemes; objective and subjective performance evaluation; relative performance evaluation; promotions and other career-based incentive schemes; team production and team incentives; stock options and executive compensation; intrinsic and extrinsic motivation; non-monetary compensation; and mandated benefits.
Generally, strategy is defined as a set of choices that managers make in order to increase their firm’s performance relative to competitors. This course provides the theoretical concepts and analytical tools required for formulating and evaluating strategies appropriate for long-term success. Topics include the internal and external environment analysis, competitive interactions, and business strategy. We will also introduce concepts important for corporate strategy, global strategy, and strategy execution. This course emphasizes the application of theory to real world strategic issues facing managers today.
This course provides students with the conceptual tools necessary to understand and work effectively in today's interconnected world by developing strategic perspectives that link this changing environment, the state of the global industry, and the capabilities and position of the firm. The course provides frameworks for identifying and taking advantage of the opportunities presented in a dynamic global environment at the level of the country and industry. It then focuses on firm-level strategic choices regarding where to engage in which activities. Finally, it covers the challenges of integrating the multiple perspectives, functions, and interests that constitute the multinational firm.
Prerequisite(s): BU.150.620 OR BU.920.607 OR BU.151.720
This course offers students the opportunity to learn and participate in design thinking: a human-centered process utilized by some of the most creative and competitive business organizations. With emphases on research, ideation, and prototyping, design thinking helps students leverage their creativity and collective expertise to achieve innovative solutions. During this course, students will work in teams to solve complex problems while applying the entire design thinking process. A large component of the course is experiential, but students will examine design thinking through multiple academic lenses (design and design theory, organizational behavior, and social psychology).