Courses
- MBA G203 The Global Context of Management
The economies of the world are ever more closely linked. Record levels of international trade and investment are achieved every year. Cross-border mergers and acquisitions are booming. The foreign exchange markets handle trillions of dollars of volume daily. Offshore provision of services has grown immensely. Host governments and non-governmental organizations operating internationally affect how companies do business far from their home bases and close to home. Few businesses today can avoid being connected to the world economy, and it is quite likely that the process of globalization will continue apace. To succeed as a leader in your career, you will need to be able to think systematically about the challenges brought about by globalization.
This course is designed to help you develop as a leader in this international environment. Our objectives are:
- To help you develop an analytic framework that you can use to understand, systematically, why it is that countries are different or similar in ways that matter to managers of organizations.
- To see how successful organizations leverage these differences and similarities to their advantage, sometimes becoming more ‘global’ in reach and other times taking advantage of their more ‘local’ advantages.
- To help you develop the insights needed to successfully lead organizations in different contexts worldwide.
- MBA S359 Aligning Start Ups With Their Markets
This course is offered for students who at some time may want to undertake an entrepreneurial career in the information technology business. Most everyone associated with technology start-ups would agree that the most important initial characteristic of a successful endeavor is a compelling vision. The journey from vision to escape velocity is highly dependent on management's ability to translate that vision into a product or service that closely and economically addresses a customer's significant point of pain. Without a tight product market fit, the start-up's offering will not be able to break through the market's gravitational forces which strongly favor existing solutions, resulting in likely failure. With tight product/market fit, it is far more likely the company will achieve repeatable and growing sales success. Conventional wisdom dictates that a start-up launching a new product should focus its energy understanding what the market wants (problem) and then translating that knowledge into an optimal set of product features (solution). This is the ideal strategy if one is attacking a market that already exists. However if the start-up pursues an entirely new market or re-segments an existing market, customers are unlikely to be able to articulate the benefits and features they will need. The approaches required to pursue new or re-segmented markets are radically different from those applied to existing markets. As a result it is not relentless execution and exploitation of a well understood market that will lead to success, but discovery of a new market or segment that is in need of the product as envisioned. If done well, this process of finding the optimal product/market fit has a disproportionate impact on success. Our intention is to create a course that explores the many issues associated with optimizing product/market fit.
