General Management 2 (BUSA90483)

Finance:

This is an introductory course of valuation and financial management. The course is designed for all MBA students with career interests in managing any organizations where cash flows matter. It is based on the principle that firms should be managed to increase the wealth of their shareholders, subject to the fulfilment of their contractual and legal obligations to other stakeholders. To this purpose, this subject will focus on the valuation of financial assets and selection of investment projects. It provides a good foundation for those who want to specialize in finance. Furthermore, students will find that the principles learned here can be readily applied to their own personal financial planning and investments.

Leadership:

Organizations face many adaptive challenges to survive and thrive in a context of a complex and uncertain environment driven by forces such as globalization and technology. Managers maintain the status quo efficiently but leaders help individuals, teams, organizations, and societies to do adaptive work. Leadership has been defined as “the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done, and how to do it, and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to achieve shared objectives” (Yukl, 2006). Leadership is not a position but a process and it is often emergent and shared by individuals who choose to be leaders and have developed leadership capability. Leadership is particularly important in new organization structures that are flat, flexible, diverse, and global rather than hierarchical, stable, and homogenous. There is substantial evidence that leadership can be learned and this introductory subject is aimed at developing the capability to lead individuals and teams through intrapersonal (i.e., self-awareness and self-management) and interpersonal (i.e., social awareness and social skill) development. This subject is a five day intensive that includes theoretical and conceptual content alongside solo and group exercises designed to prepare students for leadership experiences in the MBA program and their future careers.

Social Responsibility and Ethics:

In this subject, students learn about the societal context in which business operates, together with the skills for reasoning about ethical problems that arise in this context. The course examines the various stakeholders of business and discusses the obligations of corporations to those stakeholders. It considers strategies for achieving corporate social responsibility goals – such as environmental sustainability and social outcomes -- taking into account both the ethical case and the business case for such strategies. The course also examines a range of alternative approaches to moral reasoning as well as the applications of those approaches to the complex and dynamic ethical problems that confront leaders of modern organizations, both in Australia and in other cultures.

Marketing Management:

This subject focuses on the challenges faced by organisations in managing demand, and how to address those challenges with optimal demand-side strategies. To be successful, organisations have to be able to recognise, create, grow, and protect market-based assets that influence demand. Brand equity, the installed base of customers, and support from channels (e.g., intermediaries such as retailers) constitute the most important market-based assets that help produce market outcomes such as sales growth, price premiums, market share, customer share, customer retention, customer referrals, and addressable markets. In this subject, students will learn how (and which) marketing investments help develop market-based assets, how market-based assets translate into market outcomes, and how market outcomes in turn help in ensuring the long-term survival and success of organisations.

Process and Operations Management:

In fiercely competitive global and dynamic environments, companies face increasing pressures to exceed customer expectations along multiple performance measures, such as cost, quality, flexibility and innovativeness. To outperform their competitors, many firms make the mistake of mimicking their rivals, rather than focusing on developing the organizational capabilities that competitors will find difficult to match over the long term. And although operations are at the core of a firm’s value adding activities, few firms have sought to build a sustainable competitive advantage around these capabilities.

Operations deals with the design, management and continuous improvement of business processes. It aims at providing some of the core concepts in operations that are essential for leveraging a firm’s operational capabilities to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. This course provides a logical and rigorous approach to plan and control process structure and managerial levers to achieve desired business process performance.

Personal Effectiveness 2:

The “Personal Effectiveness Program” (PEP) runs across the three core modules and is designed to help students develop the skills and knowledge required to effectively manage the early stages of their career. PEP identifies specific needs of each individual student and then provides ongoing support, training, and opportunities to practice and perfect these skills. PEP focuses on three core areas.

1. Communication skills: These skills include effective presentations, verbal communication, written communication, and public speaking
2. Career development skills: These skills include case practice, interview skills, CV writing, networking, and business etiquette
3. Team skills: These skills include managing conflict, cultural awareness, giving and receiving feedback, and resilience.

Entrepreneurial Mindset 2:

The “Entrepreneurial Mindset Program” (EMP) runs across the three core modules and is designed to help students develop an entrepreneurial mindset. EMP helps students develop the knowledge, skills, and attributes to identify and evaluate value creation opportunities, view obstacles, problems, and failure as opportunities, modify opportunities to make them viable, and sell ideas to others.