Executive Management 3 (BUSA90507)

This subject contains four components, as described below.

Finance I

This component is designed to provide students with foundation knowledge about financial management. This foundation knowledge provides the basis for funding a firm’s investments and using its resources efficiently. The topics covered will include:

• Foundations of capital budgeting and project valuation
• Foundations of financial instruments
• Foundations of portfolio theory
• Foundations of capital structure determinants

Managerial Judgment

The brain is a truly amazing biological machine, moulded through millions of years of evolutionary pressure. More recent changes in human history have created a gap between the world for which our brains were designed, and the world in which we actually live. This mismatch is played out in many aspects of management and leadership. We suffer from strong biases that hinder good decision-making, and we often fail to develop realistic perceptions of others and of ourselves. Fortunately, scientists have generated a great deal of knowledge that allows us to identify these deficiencies and to find remedies for them. These sessions are based on long-standing psychological research as well as state-of-the-art neurobiological research that sheds light on the obstacles we face when making decisions. By discovering the roots of many of our biases we can also learn remedies to these problems so that we can avoid pitfalls in decision-making.

Economics of Strategy

Economics of Strategy aims at providing a framework and a set of tools that help an executive manager develop and evaluate strategic options and make the right choices. By extracting from microeconomic theory those concepts and techniques that enable a decision-maker to evaluate his or her strategic position, students seek out new opportunities, and make fact-based, educated conjectures about their likely success. The focus will be on decisions at the individual business unit level that aim at advancing a firm’s market position.

Concepts and tools of microeconomics, game theory, and strategic management theory are used to answer questions such as:

• How does the market environment constrain a firm in its ability to set the price of its products and services?
• Which strategies can a firm employ to prosper in the face of competition?
• How can the firm increase the value it captures in business-to-business transactions in which few players operate?

Seminar III:

This Executive MBA Seminar Series complements the mainstream components of the module, and is dedicated to contemporary issues and global best practice development in the Operations, Ethical Leadership and Economics of Strategy fields.