Each Organizational Perspectives course is presented from the viewpoint of a key internal or external role, rather than a discrete function. Contextually grounded, each course frames the managerial questions necessary for engagement of that role, brings insights from the functional management disciplines (Finance, Marketing, etc.) to provide answers to those questions, and affords the opportunity for focused consideration of values-based and ethical issues, creating a coherent view of problem solving, engagement, and leadership.

Introduction to Negotiations

Taught at the beginning of the Organizational Perspectives segment, this module's objective is to learn a conceptual framework for analyzing and shaping negotiation processes and outcomes. Negotiation can be broken down into two basic activities: creating value and capturing value. Creating value is about making the pie bigger, while capturing value is about getting the largest possible slice for yourself. The module presents strategies for achieving both of these objectives at the same time. The module also helps students to develop a repertoire of negotiation strategies and skills. There are several opportunities to negotiate with classmates in a simulated environment.

Competitor

This course enables students to be better managers by equipping them to (1) identify key players in the environment both from a competitive and a cooperative perspective, (2) identify the objectives and constraints of those players given the environment in which a manager's own organization and competing organizations are embedded, (3) anticipate the likely actions that competitors will take given their objectives and constraints, and (4) recognize and deal with the feedback between their own actions and the actions of other agents. The course explicitly recognizes that relevant players in the environment include government and nonprofit organizations as well as corporations and that these players act both cooperatively and competitively. Thus an important premise of this course is that the environment within which organizations compete is multi-layered, encompassing not only the market but political, cultural, and legal dimensions. Finally, the course explicitly draws attention to the fact that objectives and constraints arise not only from the external faces of the environment but from internal features of the organization. The course draws from the disciplines of economics, marketing, organizational behavior, and politics.

Customer

The course takes the viewpoint that the best way to create and keep a customer is to develop a deep understanding of customer behavior, integrate that understanding across the organization, and align the organizational structure to both satisfy current customer needs and adapt to changes in customer needs better than competitors. To be truly customer-focused and market-driven, a company (profit or nonprofit) should develop the capability to sense and respond to the changing needs of customers in the market. An important element of the course is the idea that customer focus must extend to the entire organization across all its major functions for it to be successful. The course consists of two main modules: (1) Understanding Customers and Creating a Superior Value Proposition and (2) Creating and Maintaining a Customer-Aligned Organization. The first module focuses on understanding customer needs in consumer and industrial markets from a multidisciplinary perspective (economics, psychology, and sociology) to create a superior value proposition; the second highlights how creating a customer-aligned organization requires functional perspectives that span marketing, operations, accounting, finance, and human resource management.

Investor

This course is about investors: what they do, how they think, and what they care about. The course is, in places, quantitative. It makes use of basic concepts in probability, statistics, and regression analysis. Course topics include returns, risk, and prices; asset allocation; efficient markets; valuation and fundamentals-based investing; the capital asset pricing model (CAPM); quantitative equity investing; bond markets; evaluating money manager performance; futures and options; and investment errors and human psychology.

The Global Macroeconomy

This course develops a framework for understanding the causes and consequences of macroeconomic events in real time, a useful input to the management of any enterprise, local or global, profit or nonprofit. The course begins by defining basic national accounting identities and using these identities to compare countries’ economic structure and performance over time. The rest of the course considers models in which the choices of private and public agents interact to produce aggregate outcomes in response to policy or economic shocks. In developing and using these models, the course draws on numerous historical and contemporary examples, paying particular attention to current events and the countries students visit during their International Experience trips.

Sourcing and Managing Funds

This course considers groups within the firm tasked to raise money from different sources as well as manage different aspects of those funds within the organization. Many of these functions are concentrated within the office of the chief financial officer (CFO), split between the treasurer and the controller. But many other functions are spread across the organization, principally in the hands of strategy groups and product managers. Topics include capital structure decisions; capital structure: equity funding; capital structure: debt funding; capital budgeting: cash flow analysis and techniques; capital budgeting: incorporating risk; taxes; the planning process; inputs for decision making; performance evaluation; transfer pricing; and corporate risk management.

State and Society

This course has five objectives. First, it aims to pro­vide students with insight into the motives driving a diverse array of nonmarket constituencies. These constituencies include elected and unelected public officials, leaders of NGOs, interest-group advocates, and representatives of multinational organizations, as well as organized (and sometimes unorganized) movements that arise in a society. Second, the course examines underlying societal trends that can have a significant impact on the opportunities and risks faced by business management. Third, it provides insight into some of the systematic sources of variation across the nation-states that can impact managerial and investment decisions. Fourth, the course helps students read the institutional environment of the firm — legal and regulatory frameworks, media market structures, religious organizations, and many other factors. Finally, the course repeatedly asks students to reflect on the differences between what is legal and what is right, what is customary and what is legal, what is customary and what is right.

Employee

Leadership influence on employees is at least threefold: an impact on the employees who are brought into and retained in the organization; a strong role in shaping the context in which employees act (culture, rewards, etc.); and a personal relationship with those whom you manage, which can profoundly influence subordinates' values, beliefs, and behaviors. The purpose of this course is to enhance the student's capability as a manager and leader to take actions that align employees' actions with organizational goals and objectives. The course is organized into four parts. It begins by placing the manager's relationship with employees in the broader context of the organization's human resource strategy. Then it examines in closer detail some of the main levers that managers and organizations can use, paying attention to four factors: recruitment and selection; employee evaluation and development; extrinsic rewards, compensation systems, and job design; and the connection between the employee's identity and organizational objectives. The third portion of the course briefly considers the challenges of transforming employment relations. The course concludes by discussing how employment relationships are shaped by values and ethics—those of the manager, as well as those of the larger organization.

Innovator

This class studies issues of idea generation, idea evaluation and development, creative projects, and fostering and sustaining innovation in organizations. Students are exposed both to the ways of thinking of innovators and to the promises and perils of interacting with and managing innovators. Students generate ideas in a number of contexts, and evaluate ideas that they and others have generated in terms of customer adoption (the market) and feasibility. They analyze innovation in a set of companies across sectors. Students also engage in a role-playing exercise to get a sense for how the innovator's perspective interacts with a managerial perspective rooted in the other Organizational Perspectives courses.

Operations Engine

The course broadens the traditional operations management course by including and emphasizing linkages to organizational behavior and workforce management, strategy, accounting, finance, and marketing. At its heart, this course is about using quantitative models to provide managerial insights. The framework for this course is simple: First, we focus on how work is organized and how processes are improved. At the next higher level, we consider the relationship among work centers, suppliers, and customers: the design and improvement of the supply chain. Finally, operations analysis influences and is influenced by the organization's competitive strategy. While carrying out these activities, organizations need to continually improve manufacturing and service quality. These activities of process improvement, supply chain management, and quality management fundamentally involve issues of workforce management and organizational behavior and require understanding and applying capital budgeting and other accounting/finance tools, and coordination with the marketing function.