Your Course of Study
This leadership development program is offered in three modules, allowing managers to return to their organizations after each module and start implementing what they have learned. Functional excellence is the overarching theme in the first module, which takes place at Tsinghua SEM in Beijing. The focus of the second module, offered at CEIBS in Shanghai, is strategic management. Leadership is the central theme of the third module that brings participants to the HBS campus in Boston.
Module One: Understanding and Managing Key Functional Areas
Principles of General Management
- Examining the effectiveness of a company's strategy
- Linking a company's strategy to organizational design and critical inputs
- Refining your judgment and enhancing your skill set
Marketing
- Understanding how marketing creates value
- Leveraging contemporary marketing concepts and tools—from market segmentation and product positioning to the design of distribution channels and communications strategy
- Analyzing customer needs and buying behavior
- Achieving marketing value through pricing initiatives
Management Control
- Understanding how management control systems provide critical information for measuring and managing product and customer profitability
- Using formal control systems, including the Balanced Scorecard, to guide and monitor business strategies
Module Two: Competing Successfully in China and the Global Economy
Strategy
- Understanding how firms create and sustain competitive advantage
- Analyzing the link between superior financial performance and the strategic moves of rivals and suppliers
- Formulating and administering a successful strategy in the face of economic uncertainty and fierce competition
- Creating an overall plan by integrating policies in each functional area
Strategic Human Resources
- Building organizations that outpace rivals in the short term and that innovate over time
- Discovering performance and opportunity gaps
- Identifying the root causes of weakness in organizational design
- Understanding the links between innovation and organizational evolution, and building teams for innovation
Finance
- Understanding and leveraging the appropriate tools for managing corporate financial resources, including the latest theories and best practices of strategic profitability analyses and resource allocation
- Analyzing and optimizing capital structure, capital markets, and financial institutions through entrepreneurial finance, acquisition, the benefits and costs of doing LBOs, the original structure, and financing of the company
- Designing capital structure to achieve a cost advantage
Negotiations
- Achieving greater effectiveness at the negotiating table—including circumstances involving multiple parties, issues and agendas, and evolving time frames
- Handling challenges such as hard bargainers and negotiating across borders
- Knowing when and how to manage the tension between cooperative actions to create value jointly versus when and how to take action to claim value individually.
Module Three: Leadership, Values, Organization, and Governance
Leadership and Change Management
- Understanding the role of leadership and effectively managing change
- Recognizing and meeting the challenges to leadership effectiveness in a variety of settings and at several different levels of the corporation
- Developing a compelling leadership style
Corporate Governance and Values
- Achieving sound governance—the changing role of the board of directors and its relationship with corporate management
- Understanding the role of the board in strategic planning and as an agent of change
- Creating an environment of ethical responsibility
Innovation
- Understanding why some companies are more innovative than others
- Building, managing, and improving innovation systems
- Leveraging open innovation for idea generation, problem solving, and growth
- Using business experimentation for competitive advantage
- Designing management systems for business innovation
Entrepreneurship
- Evaluating entrepreneurial ventures
- Understanding the value created by corporate entrepreneurship
Business and Government in the International Economy
- Understanding the roots of conflict and convergence among nations competing in the world economy
- Identifying global issues stemming from government policies on issues such as trade flows, exchange rates, investment, and technological innovation
- Recognizing how different nations conceptualize the roles and relationships of government and business, and how these varying conceptions affect managerial decision making
- Analyzing the factors involved in making direct foreign investment decisions
- Examining the sustainability of and limitations to China's economic growth