Your Course of Study
For eight intensive weeks, you will work alongside a diverse group of the world's most senior executives and engage daily with the HBS faculty—intellectual thought leaders who pioneered the case method and business concepts practiced by top executives worldwide. Highly structured, yet deeply personalized, AMP 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
Three key themes are woven throughout this course: operational execution, empathy, and the role of investors in achieving operational excellence. You will gain the skills needed to:
- Identify current and future challenges and opportunities in operations
- Understand how operational capabilities can lead to sustainable competitive advantage
- Examine the drivers of excellence in operations by focusing on the role of the leader and the general manager
Key topics addressed include:
- Maximizing talent—setting up your company to derive extraordinary work from ordinary people with fairly typical skills
- Building on past success—identifying what has led to prior success and what will distinguish your firm in the future
- Managing day-to-day issues—understanding the importance of addressing everyday problems related to quality, availability, and customer service
Business, Government and the International Economy: Leading in the Global Economy
This course provides a framework for analyzing national economic management and international competitiveness, as well as growth 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 recovery from a debt crisis
- Collapse of socialism in the USSR
- African renaissance
- Islamic resurgence
- European integration
- Japanese and U.S. descent into deficits and debt
Key topics addressed include:
- Policy issues around the world—analyzing competitiveness and economic management in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the United States
- Up-to-date global intelligence—examining the regional trajectories of growth, development, and governmental strategies leading the world economy toward globalization
- Executive decision making—focusing on the essentials of competitive analysis, including national income accounting, balance of payments, fiscal and monetary policy, and real exchange rates
Financial Management: Mastering the Essentials of Corporate Financial Management
This curriculum provides a framework for understanding the financial dimensions of competitive strategy and managing more effectively in an unpredictable global economy. You will examine the three responsibilities of a financial manager:
- Assuring that the firm does not run out of cash
- Making good investment decisions
- Making good financing decisions
The financial management sessions are designed to provide:
- A conceptual framework for analyzing financial issues and assessing the financial health of a firm
- A toolkit of analytical techniques
- An understanding of financial instruments, institutions, and markets
- An appreciation for the financial issues typically encountered within a firm and how the firm's financial decisions can facilitate its competitive strategy
You also will engage in six short case modules:
- Module 1: Financial Forecasting
- Module 2: Capital Budgeting Decisions
- Module 3: Financial Markets and Institutions
- Module 4: Capital Structure Decisions
- Module 5: Cost of Capital
- Module 6: Comprehensive Cases
Key topics addressed include:
- Profitability and growth—focusing on the executive's role in balancing profit and growth, as well as addressing value gaps in highly dynamic environments
- Capital cost and cash flow—conveying the essentials of capital structure, capital markets, financial institutions, and standard analysis techniques
- Shareholder value—highlighting the levers for enhanced shareholder value and understanding the effects of value-based management concepts
Leadership and Corporate Accountability
This course focuses on the responsibilities of companies, their leaders, and their boards. You will explore the related economic, legal, and ethical dimensions 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.
Key topics addressed include:
- Leaders as fiduciaries—examining the responsibilities of companies, their leaders, and their boards
- Global standards of business conduct—understanding the economic, legal, and ethical dimensions of these responsibilities in driving performance
- Societal and individual implications—considering the role of business in society and assessing your personal philosophy of business leadership
Leadership in Organizations: Managing Innovation and Organizational Effectiveness
Organizations succeed not only by optimizing current strategies, but also by innovating for the future. Focusing on your role as an individual leader, this course 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 the key facets of leadership organizations:
- Personal Leadership—explores how effective leaders take charge of their careers and avoid the pitfalls of derailment that can arise along the way
- Team Leadership—examines how leaders leverage the skills and capabilities of others around them to get things done inside the organization
- Organizational Leadership—focuses on how leaders build and manage high-performing organizations
Key topics addressed include:
- Winning in the short term—acquiring a set of methodologies and action-planning tools for diagnosing and solving organizational problems
- Leading innovation streams—exploring the techniques for managing incremental and disruptive innovation, as well as the organizational dilemmas inherent in managing strategic contradictions
- Leadership and change—analyzing the options for articulating a clear vision, building a coalition of support, and aligning an organization that is capable of reinventing itself
Marketing: Leveraging the Power of Marketing
Focusing on ways to create value, this results-oriented overview of marketing prepares senior leaders to leverage the firm's sales and marketing functions across multiple areas. You will gain effective strategies for maximizing the potential of digital marketing for greater bottom-line and shareholder value.
This course explores the issues that general managers typically confront when dealing with the customer-facing functions of a firm, including marketing, sales, and service. These functions span the entire process and include:
- Understanding market, segment, and customer needs—what they want versus what the firm can do for them
- Converting and enhancing this knowledge to create customer value through viable value propositions
- Communicating and delivering the customer value created with the engagement of the customer Extracting a fair share of this value for the firm
Key topics addressed include:
- Customer management—focusing on the successful management of customer acquisition and retention, segmentation, profitability, and lifetime value
- Corporate brand management—examining proven ways of developing, managing, and extracting value from a corporate brand and/or subsidiary brands to enhance business performance
- Marketing and the CEO—exploring how to develop a set of company-specific metrics that enables the board to monitor marketing results on an ongoing basis
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, raising money from investors, managing a conflict inside the firm, or tackling a dispute that is headed toward litigation, your ability to negotiate will affect your performance.
Through a strategy-oriented framework, this course explores how to plan, negotiate, receive feedback, and discuss the essentials of negotiation strategy. 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
Key topics addressed include:
- Capturing an appropriate share of the value that is created
- Achieving superior results in a vast array of competitive environments
- Resolving disputes and achieving desired outcomes even when others are becoming emotional or appear irrational
- Thinking strategically in competitive contexts by anticipating the strategy of others
- Understanding the vital role of ethics in negotiation, even when the parties' ethical standards vary dramatically
- Working with people whose backgrounds, expectations, perspectives, and values differ from your own
Strategy: Setting Competitive and Corporate Strategy
Examining both competitive and corporate strategy, AMP imparts concepts and frameworks for thinking analytically about strategy in times of crisis. This course prepares you to craft the overarching direction of your firm by focusing on where you will compete, how to win in those arenas, and how to sustain a competitive edge over the long run. You will learn how to:
- Size up the external environment of your firm in its entirety
- Configure your firm's internal choices to attain a competitive advantage within its external environment
- Prepare your firm for the future
Key topics addressed include:
- Environmental scanning—assessing the structural attractiveness of an industry, while identifying the threats and complements to business profitability
- Competitive positioning—emphasizing the art of configuring discrete internal activities to create new sources of competitive advantage
- Competitive sustainability—analyzing the role of senior executives in applying competitive analyses, responding to generic threats, managing risks, and employing the best alternative strategies
- Corporate strategy—applying strategic analysis to evaluate available resources, market opportunities, and the effectiveness of organizational structures, systems, and processes
Personalized Learning
To amplify the impact on both you and your sponsoring organization, AMP offers several activities devoted to personalized learning, including 360-degree feedback, one-on-one coaching, and project work that focuses on issues within your organization. As a result, you will develop a plan of action for successfully addressing your organizational challenges.
Key topics addressed include:
- Leading organizational renewal—examining key issues at the intersection of leadership and competitiveness, including strategies for leading change, fostering innovation, winning in the short term, and changing the workforce
- Crafting country-specific business strategies—exploring AMP cases that focus on doing business in specific countries and regions, and various ways of engaging in the international arena—from joint ventures to foreign direct investments
- Leveraging information technology—analyzing the current realities of IT and exploring how the future direction of IT will impact corporate leaders; you will have access to state-of-the-art IT infrastructure on the HBS campus, and all necessary hardware, software, and databases will be provided to support a range of teaching tools, including simulations, webcasts, and videoconferencing
Additional Integrative Learning
With an eye on the challenges resulting from the global economic crisis, the curriculum will include a variety of integrated learning experiences. Topics will include decision-making processes, the Balanced Scorecard, negotiation, leadership values, corporate responsibility, sustainability, emerging markets, outsourcing, and global competition, and the challenges facing particular parts of the world.
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.
"One of the benefits of being exposed to such a wide range of cultural and industry backgrounds for eight weeks is that I now understand that people approach things from very different mindsets. In my industry in the UK, for example, we may have a very different approach as we look at new markets in other areas of the world. AMP gave me the rare opportunity to experience the intensity of having six different conversations in a day with people from widely different backgrounds. And I am looking forward to building on that intensity when I get back to the office."
Jez Maiden [Group Finance Director], National Express Group PLC, U.K.