Core courses
Accounting
Profit and loss accounts and balance sheets give insights into the financial strength of competitors but you have to know what you are looking for. Many managers do not even know the financial position of their own organisation. To decide how much to charge for your products you have to know how much they cost, notoriously difficult to determine. Effective decisions require an understanding of financial and management accounting techniques plus their strengths and weaknesses.
Economics
It is often wrongly concluded that economics is irrelevant to running a business. In fact, economic factors affect businesses and decision making at three levels. At the macro level, factors such as the business cycle, interest rates and exchange rates directly affect product demand and cost of production. At the market level, the type of competition determines profitability and business strategy. At the company level, efficiency principles have a direct bearing on business success, principles such as marginal analysis, opportunity cost and profit maximisation. If you ignore economic principles, you will be unable to figure out likely changes in market conditions, you will be unable to understand competitive forces and you will have little idea of how to allocate resources efficiently.
Finance
Different investment projects generate different cash flows and different levels of risk. The problem is that choices have to be made among competing uses for funds because businesses typically face constraints on the availability of capital. Financial tools make it possible to reduce a bewildering array of cash flows spread over a variety of time periods to more easily comparable net present values. These tools enable the efficiency principles of economics to be applied in a rigorous manner. Financial concepts also provide the link between company operations and capital markets. It is impossible to understand the behaviour of the stock market without a grasp of the principles of financial analysis.
Marketing
In highly competitive markets the success or failure of a product or service may be determined by the marketing decisions you take. This course will help you make the right ones. The course will enable you to analyse and critically evaluate marketing problems and opportunities. It will also help you develop and implement marketing strategies and programmes which take best advantage of your firm's situation.
Organisational Behaviour
If you work in an organisation, you probably think you know a lot about them. But do you? An organisation continually has to adapt to changes in the competitive environment. Its effectiveness depends on the motivation and behaviour of the workforce. To capitalise on the capabilities of the workforce, it must have appropriate incentives, develop effective teams, design an attractive job environment and manage the dynamics of organisational change. By understanding the principles of organisational behaviour you acquire a deeper knowledge of how you relate to other members of the organisation.
Project Management
Implementing organisational change can be visualised as a project with time, cost and quality trade-offs. Project management tools and techniques are essential in keeping change processes on track. If you don't realise that organisational processes are actually projects, you may get nasty surprises when things turn out unexpectedly. Rigorous project management techniques will not solve all problems but they do clarify the process of achieving the project's goals. |  | 
Strategic Planning
The major problem facing chief executives is to make sense of a spectrum of information and apply appropriate tools and techniques in driving an organisation through a complex and continually changing competitive environment. The complexity of real life can be structured as a process involving objective setting, analysing competitive positioning, choosing a strategy, implementing it and adapting to feedback over time. All these steps are crucial and organisations succeed or fail depending on the robustness of their strategic processes. This means there are no easy answers to strategic problems and the solutions offered by business gurus can be seen for what they are: popular appeals to intuition, largely devoid of any conceptual or empirical basis. Strategic planning is above all about thinking effectively, and using the strategic process approach requires a sound understanding of the other core disciplines.
Elective courses
- Alliances and Partnerships
- Competitive Strategy
- Consumer Behaviour
- Corporate Governance
- Corporate Reputation, Branding and Managing People
- Credit Risk Management
- Derivatives
- Developing Effective Managers and Leaders
- Employee Relations
- Employee Resourcing (March 2009)
- Financial Risk Management
- Human Resource Development
- Human Resource Management
- Influence
- International Marketing
- Leadership
- Making Strategies Work
- Managing People in Changing Contexts
- Managing People in Global Markets
- Marketing Channels
- Marketing Communications
- Marketing Research
- Mergers and Acquisitions
- Negotiation
- Performance Management
- Practical History of Financial Markets
- Principles of Retailing
- Quantitative Methods
- Research Methods for Business and Management
- Sales Force Management
- Services Marketing
- Strategic Negotiation
- Strategic Risk Management
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