Your Course of Study
Designed to build your knowledge, business skills, and confidence as a leader over a three-year period, OPM's comprehensive curriculum delves into essential business fundamentals and emerging best practices as well as areas of special interest to business owners. Immersed in the renowned HBS case method, thought-provoking lectures, and enlightening group discussions, you will explore topics such as:
- Executing Effective Strategies
- Managing Disruptive Innovation
- Negotiating for Success
- Leveraging Markets to Create Value
- Aligning Strategy and Sales
- Managing for Organizational Effectiveness
- Maximizing Financial Resources
- Navigating the Global Economy
- Special Sessions for Business Owners
Executing Effective Strategies
As a business owner, you play the central role in setting—and achieving—your firm's long-term strategic goals. This leadership development program helps you position your company for long-term competitive advantage. You will learn how to:
- Examine the purpose, components, and role of strategy in building competitive advantage
- Evaluate the factors that influence your company's ability to sustain strategic advantage
- Assess the structure of your industry and the threats or enablers that impact profitability
- Understand the competitive environment as well as your firm's strengths and weaknesses
- Develop a viable business strategy that addresses both short-term and long-range goals
Managing Disruptive Innovation
Executives in established firms often view disruptive innovation as a threat and react by protecting the business. Innovators, however, see disruptions as game-changing opportunities and quickly capitalize on them. You will learn how to:
- Analyze opportunities and risks from a more strategic perspective
- Turn a viable opportunity into a focused strategy and business initiative
- Attract top talent and key resources to turn your vision into reality
- Build the capabilities and organization to launch and nurture early-stage ventures
- Forecast value in the face of significant uncertainty and risk
Negotiating for Success
Exceptional negotiation skills are critical for executives at every stage of their careers. OPM equips you with the confidence to lead at the negotiating table and the ability to achieve desired outcomes. You will learn how to:
- Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your decision-making and negotiation strategies
- Test and refine your bargaining skills through carefully structured simulations
- Explore the importance of building trust in a variety of business relationships
Leveraging Markets to Create Value
Whether your customers are businesses or consumers, attracting and retaining them is vital to business success. OPM explores how to assess customer profitability and lifetime value, design and price products, and develop and evaluate promotions and other marketing programs. You will learn how to:
- Analyze the key goals of an effective marketing strategy
- Consider the larger set of marketing tools—including new digital marketing options—from a profitability perspective
- Explore critical relationships among marketing, sales, product/service development, and operations/service delivery efforts
- Evaluate and adjust your firm's marketing strategy and allocation of resources
- Develop growth and change strategies to address the unique dynamics of your markets
Aligning Strategy and Sales
Since your sales channel is an important investment, you must be able to eliminate the gap between your company's overall strategy and its sales execution. OPM examines how to align your organization to sell effectively—and ensure that sales activities reinforce your strategy. You will learn how to:
- Define target customers and the best methods for selling successfully to them
- Translate corporate strategy into sales strategies, tasks, and processes that are easily understood by your sales teams and the entire organization
- Develop account management and segment management strategies based on customer profitability
- Create an environment that not only motivates your sales teams, but also facilitates and sustains your company's success
- Ensure that specific sales recruitment, development, compensation, and performance management efforts and systems support your company strategy
- Leverage resources throughout the company to meet your sales objectives
Managing for Organizational Effectiveness
Understanding how your company creates value and consumes resources requires the right performance metrics. In OPM, you will examine the tools and analytics required for meaningful measurement. You will learn how to:
- Develop, analyze, and forecast financial performance and operating results
- Understand the principles of management accounting systems
- Utilize accounting data to manage and control costs
- Apply accounting concepts to make more refined business decisions
- Use management control systems to achieve profit and performance goals
Maximizing Financial Resources
To realize your company's full potential, you need to manage your financial resources strategically. OPM is designed to help you make better-informed financing decisions. You will learn how to:
- Support strategy and decision making through financial systems
- Examine investing options for financing the growth of your business
- Value business activities to support decisions relating to investment and the purchasing or selling of business assets
- Leverage a variety of financing options to restructure your business
- Transfer ownership based on your personal financial plan
- Harvest business value by divesting a business unit or selling the firm
Navigating the Global Economy
Today's entrepreneurs must expand their global perspective. OPM takes a macroeconomic view of the international business environment, providing strategic insights that will help you lead your organization through convergence and conflict. You will learn how to:
- Identify the opportunities and challenges of doing business across borders
- Analyze country context and risk—and decide where to locate your business and key operating units
- Explore the economic, political, cultural, and social challenges faced by governments and firms conducting business on a global scale
- Identify approaches for growing your company in a networked world economy
Special Sessions for Business Owners
In addition to the core modules listed above, OPM also offers sessions that address specific focused topics of interest to business owners, such as family business challenges and personal investing.
Practical Application Between Sessions
During the time between the three OPM sessions, you will test your newly acquired skills and insights back at work. A unique supplementary program that matches participants with Harvard MBA field-study students also is available to help you implement your classroom learning across your company.
"The overall experience of meeting people in positions similar to mine from around the world really set the program apart. More than a year later, I am amazed at how we continue to network and reach out to one another. Along with the learning and networking, the program gave me the confidence to run and grow my company."
Anne Eiting Klamar [President and CEO], Midmark Corporation, U.S.