Your Course of Study
For eight intensive weeks, you will work alongside a diverse group of senior executives and engage daily with the world-renowned HBS faculty. Highly structured yet deeply personalized, AMP also delivers the 360-degree feedback and one-on-one coaching that bring about a full-scale transformation—at both the individual and organizational levels.
Building Competitive Advantage Through Operations
Effective operational execution is essential to your organization's success. AMP helps you understand the operational challenges and opportunities facing your company today and in the future. With insight into the drivers of operational excellence—and your role in facilitating that excellence—you will be prepared to leverage your company's operational capabilities to create and sustain competitive advantage.
Business, Government and the International Economy: Leading in the Global Economy
AMP provides a framework for analyzing national economic management and international competitiveness, while offering strategies for driving profitability in any global climate. It focuses on seven "trajectories" that define the business context:
- Asia's high growth
- Latin America's debt crisis recovery
- Collapse of socialism in the USSR
- African renaissance
- Islamic resurgence
- European integration
- Japanese and U.S. deficits and debt
Corporate Financial Management: Mastering the Essentials
You will gain greater insight into the financial dimensions of competitive strategy and innovative solutions for managing more effectively in an unpredictable global economy. In addition to exploring the responsibilities of a financial manager, you will examine the financial issues typically encountered within a firm and how key financial decisions can facilitate competitive strategy.
Your study of financial management provides not only an understanding of financial instruments, institutions, and markets, but also conceptual frameworks and tools for analyzing financial challenges and assessing the financial health of a firm. Key topics include financial forecasting, capital budgeting, financial markets and institutions, and capital structures.
Leadership and Corporate Accountability
Delving into the responsibilities of companies, their leaders, and their boards, you will explore the economic, legal, and ethical dimensions of accountability, and learn how to drive performance that delivers on all three dimensions.
Through a series of complex dilemmas set in different regions of the world, you will build a framework for accountable decision making and good governance. You also will have opportunities to consider the role of business in society and to reflect on your own business leadership philosophy.
Leadership in Organizations: Managing Innovation and Organizational Effectiveness
Organizations succeed not only by optimizing current strategies, but also by innovating for the future. AMP equips you with the skills to build and manage a high-performing organization that drives change. Following an introductory session, you will engage in three modules that focus on key facets of leadership:
- Personal leadership—exploring how effective leaders take charge of their careers and avoid pitfalls
- Team leadership—examining how leaders leverage the skills and capabilities of others around them to get things done inside the organization
- Organizational leadership—focusing on how leaders build and manage effective organizations
Marketing: Leveraging the Power of Marketing
Centered on ways to create value, this results-oriented overview of marketing prepares you to leverage your firm's sales and marketing functions across multiple areas. You will gain effective strategies for maximizing the potential of traditional and digital marketing for greater bottom-line and shareholder value.
In particular, you will examine the issues that typically confront general managers who deal with the customer-facing functions of a firm, including marketing, sales, and service. You also will explore effective strategies for:
- Understanding market, segment, and customer needs—what customers want versus what your firm can do for them
- Converting and enhancing this knowledge to create customer value through viable value propositions
- Communicating and delivering the value created by engaging with the customer
- Extracting a fair share of customer value for your firm
Negotiation
Managerial and executive success requires the ability to negotiate. Whether you are forging an agreement with suppliers, trying to ink a deal with potential customers, seeking money from investors, managing a conflict inside your firm, or tackling a dispute that is headed toward litigation, your ability to negotiate will affect your performance.
Through a strategy-oriented framework, AMP helps you plan, negotiate, receive feedback, and discuss the essentials of negotiation strategy with your team. You will improve your analytical, decision-making, and negotiation skills through:
- Powerful dealmaking concepts—examining the tools and strategies needed to create and sustain corporate value
- Hands-on negotiation simulations—gaining a better understanding of the behavior of individuals and organizations
- Effective negotiation tools—approaching negotiation systematically, engaging with all parties, and closing the deal
Strategy: Setting Competitive and Corporate Strategy
Examining both competitive and corporate strategy, AMP imparts concepts and frameworks for thinking analytically about strategy. You will improve your ability to craft the direction of your firm by focusing on where you will compete and how to win in those arenas. You also will explore effective approaches to:
- Sizing up the external environment of your firm in its entirety
- Configuring your firm's internal choices to attain a competitive advantage
- Preparing your firm for the future
Learning That Comes to Life
AMP amplifies the impact on both you and your sponsoring organization through a carefully designed set of program components that makes the learning highly personal, extremely relevant—and truly transformational.
- Personalized Reflection & Action Plan – Drawing on your AMP learning, you will develop a personal leadership plan, an action plan for a specific company challenge, or a report on an industry-changing trend. This special project will enable you to improve your strategy and analysis skills by delving into a relevant issue that interests you. Using the vast HBS resources available to AMP participants, you can leverage this project to help contribute to your career, company, or industry.
- Access to Faculty – While every Executive Education program offers the opportunity to connect with members of the prestigious HBS faculty, this dynamic interaction is a special aspect of AMP. As you progress through the program's curriculum and your Personalized Reflection & Action Plan, faculty members will be available to challenge your thinking and provide different perspectives.
- Research Assistance – Access to research specialists from the Baker Library/Bloomberg Center staff who will assist you in advancing and enriching your Strategic Capstone Project. This resource also will help you take full advantage of the vast library collections, uncover the research best suited to your needs, and make the best use of your time during AMP.
- 360-Degree Feedback – Our 360-degree feedback tool and associated workgroup prompt you to explore your personal leadership style and set the stage for rigorous self-assessment and personal leadership development.
- Coaching – One-on-one sessions with professional coaches and seasoned senior business professionals can help you rethink your approach to leadership, consider the next steps for your company and career, assess your strengths and weaknesses, and work on your Strategy Capstone Project.
- Elective Breakout Sessions – AMP allows you to dig deeply into focused topics that are important to you and your company. Topics may include corporate social responsibility, entrepreneurship, marketing strategies, and social media.
Additional Integrative Learning
Some sessions will simulate real-world experiences in real time—the need to think quickly and make confident decisions without having the time for extensive research and analysis. No reading will be assigned for these challenging sessions. In fact, you will not know the topic or the faculty member teaching the session in advance. As you apply your AMP learnings to the challenge at hand, you will improve your ability to respond rapidly and decisively in the face of the unknown—the reality that senior executives confront daily.
Thought Leadership
Several sessions draw on the general management expertise of the core AMP faculty and other well-known HBS faculty members, such as John Kotter, Michael Porter, Frances Frei, Clayton Christensen, and Bill George. You also will have the unique opportunity to learn firsthand from some of the industry's most influential thinkers.
Another memorable feature of AMP centers on the inspiring sessions with renowned CEOs. Through these sessions, you will deepen your understanding of how the world's top executives have overcome critical challenges and are leading their companies to greater success.
Strengthen Your Mind, Body and Spirit
During AMP, you can take advantage of extensive fitness and recreation offerings at Shad Hall. Our campus athletic facility features cardio and weight rooms; an indoor track; indoor squash and racquetball courts; and a gymnasium with basketball, volleyball, and soccer courts. AMP participants have exclusive access to early morning cycling and strength training classes, as well as afternoon yoga classes. Other specialty classes include Pilates and aerobics. Throughout the program, you can work with a personal trainer and nutrition consultant, who will help you design a personal fitness plan. For outdoor exercise, the adjacent Charles River provides scenic miles of walking, bicycling, and rowing.
Midcourse Break
A four-day break is scheduled midway through the program. During this interlude, family members are invited to campus to participate in a two-day event that includes special class sessions for spouses, social gatherings, as well as activities for younger family members. The break also allows participants the opportunity to spend time in the New England area or travel home.