Master of Business Administration

This module will approach leadership by identifying practices that researchers and practitioners have shown to be the most effective. Through these processes, students will gain a broad range of skills. This module examines how leaders can most effectively use the resources of their team members to achieve business outcomes. The module develops managerial and leadership competencies, focusing on how key improvements in the general strategy and techniques of managing people can produce outcomes more significant than isolated improvements to employee performance. The module provides students with concepts to support them across their careers as they continue to develop effective delegation, management strategy, and engagement with people inside of an organisation. Specific topics covered include managing a diverse workforce; self-leadership; perception pitfalls; decision making; conflict resolution; emotional intelligence; improving performance; team structure.

In this module students will gain the capacity to understand how firms work in a global context, incorporating a broad, future-oriented, systems-based approach that incorporates data, information and insights from diverse perspectives and sources. This module is designed to convey the key concepts of strategic thinking and how they fit into the larger context of management strategy and decisions. Students will be presented with both the practical “how” and the fundamental “why” in the light of contributions from behavioural science, economics, and statistics.

This course covers core concepts in accounting, finance, and microeconomics relevant to running a business.

The course begins with finance for business, including the time value of money, the trade-off between risk and return, and arbitrage. It gives managers a strengthened knowledge in finance that can be applied in their professional careers. The topics covered include how to move cash flows in time, the methods and principles of capital budgeting, valuation of bonds and stocks, how to characterize risk and return, and options pricing with applications to managerial decisions.

The course then builds on the student’s knowledge of finance to introduce accounting and examines the subject from the viewpoint of users external to the organization. Topics include transaction analysis; the accounting cycle; financial-statement preparation, use, and analysis; revenue recognition and cost measurement; present value; and problems in financial-accounting disclosure.

This course concludes with microeconomic theory and its application to problems faced by managers. Topics include supply and demand, consumer behaviour, pricing when a firm has market power, and contracts.

In this module, students will gain the capacity to appropriately apply a broad repertoire of communication skills in business, professional, and social contexts.

Throughout the module, students will critically analyse managerial communication skills required for leadership in a wide variety of industries. It considers the varied means of communication including writing, speaking, and calling, and generally appearing professional. The communication requirements of different contexts are studied, including informational, persuasive, and relational forms of communication.

In this module students will strengthen their capacity to lead individuals, teams, and organisations in processes that generate data-driven solutions to problems, data-driven insights into customer behaviour, and data-driven decision-making.

This module provides the foundations of probability and statistics required for a manager to interpret large quantities of data and to make informed decisions under conditions of uncertainty, with incomplete information, and in both structured and unstructured settings. Theoretical topics include decision trees, hypothesis testing, multiple regression, and sampling.

This module enables students to develop the skills and concepts needed to ensure the ongoing contribution of a firm's operations to its competitive position. It helps them to understand the complex processes underlying the development and manufacture of products as well as the creation and delivery of services. Throughout the module, students will receive a comprehensive overview of technology utilisation to drive a competitive advantage for company operations. Students explore various technology solutions for business process automation, including value proposition analysis across organisation functions.

Specific topics addressed include process analysis; cross-functional and cross-firm integration; product development; information technology; and technology and operations strategy.

Additionally, students will analyse how technology can be leveraged to improve product development during the four lifecycle phases. The module provides a detailed overview of the impact of technology on various operating models such as manufacturing, supply chain management, customer-facing, product development, and support functions.

In this module, students will develop specialised and multi disciplinary capacities to generate creative solutions and alternatives to existing business issues by refining their ability to lead processes that stimulate and manage creativity in a business. Students will reflect critically on templates and methods for designing, implementing, and assessing processes that introduce creativity to real work situations. The module will engage with both the theoretical frameworks and practical methods or tools for cultivating practices of creativity in response to real business challenges.Ultimately, the module cultivates skills for autonomous managers to lead creative projects, people, and ventures, and to oversee the processes thatkeep them on track.

The role of marketing management in organisations is to identify and measure the needs and wants of consumers, to determine which targets the business can serve, to decide on the appropriate offerings to serve these markets, and to determine the optimal methods of pricing, promoting, and distributing the firm’s offerings. Successful organisations are those that integrate the objectives and resources of the organisation with the needs and opportunities of the marketplace. The goal of this module is to facilitate student achievement of these goals regardless of career path.

This module addresses how to design and implement the best combination of marketing efforts to carry out a firm's strategy in its target markets. Specifically, this module helps to develop the student's understanding of how the firm can benefit by creating and delivering value to its customers, and stakeholders, and develop skills in applying the analytical concepts and tools of marketing to such decisions as segmentation and targeting, branding, pricing, distribution, and promotion.

This module is designed to achieve an understanding of fundamental notions of data presentation and analysis and to use statistical thinking inthe context of business problems. The module addresses modern methods of data exploration (designed to reveal unusual or problematic aspects of databases), the uses and abuses of the basic techniques of inference, and the use of regression as a tool for management and for financial analysis. The potential ethical issues related to each topic will be reviewed. Socially and environmentally relevant data will be utilised throughout the module.The goal of the module is not to turn students into statisticians but to enable them to appreciate the use of probability in assessing evidence and making decisions, and to be statistically literate consumers of quantitative information generated by economists, biomedical researchers, psychologists, statisticians, survey researchers, and other experts.

This module explores basic economic principles (theories and applications) that are relevant to a variety of businesses. The module emphasises an economist's mindset and amassing the tools necessary todo so, including the study of microeconomics and macroeconomics. Throughout the module, students will examine the underlying economics of successful business strategy: the strategic imperatives of competitive markets, the sources and dynamics of competitive advantage, managing competitive interactions, and the organisational implementation of business strategy. Additionally, the module focuses on case discussion and analysis and provides a foundation for consultants, managers, and corporate finance generalists.

This course provides a strategic framework for executive leadership in the ever-evolving global tech landscape. It focuses on identifying emerging technology trends and developing strategies that ensure long-term success in dynamic, international business environments.

This course explores global branding and market positioning strategies across multiple business models, including B2B, B2C, B2G, and D2C. It provides insights into creating effective brand identities, customer engagement tactics, and market strategies that resonate in diverse international contexts, particularly for products, services, technology, and SaaS offerings.

This course focuses on equipping executives with the tools to adapt their leadership styles to diverse geographies, cultures, and organizational stages. It emphasizes transformative leadership as a means of driving social change, highlighting ethical decision-making, inclusivity, and the alignment of leadership strategies with both organizational goals and societal impact.

The Digital Action Programme for Business Administration provides a capstone course in which students deepen and apply their learning through a 'Digital Action Programme' (DAP). In the DAP, students are grouped into cohorts (typically five students) and must work both individually and together on a specific, real, contemporary business consultancy problem related to their specialisation (Data Analytics; Marketing; Finance; International Business; DEI), normally proposed by a cooperating organisation (corporation or non-profit), which results in a comprehensive solution proposal.

This provides students with a real-world business consultancy engagement, and the opportunity to produce, both individually and as a team, a substantial piece of relevant, scholarly, and actionable research, to be presented directly to stakeholders in the cooperating organisation.

Over the course of the DAP, students fulfil the learning objectives: each student demonstrates their comprehensive knowledge and understanding of key business processes; each student uses multidisciplinary approaches to perform critical analyses of real business issues in situations of uncertainty and incomplete information in order to develop an actionable solution; each student practises teamwork, exercises their leadership skills, and reflects on their own performance and the performance of their cohort; and each student communicates to members of their cohort, the cooperating organisation, and faculty members from Woolf. Students are required to demonstrate autonomy, individual scholarly acumen, self-reflection in their engagement with peers, role adaptability within their cohort, and teamwork while engaged in the DAP. The goal of the DAP is (1) to fulfil the learning objectives and (2) to produce a project portfolio related to the area of specialisation containing an analysis of the business problem and the proposed solution.

DAP Roles and Responsibilities

Individual students

Students are required to take responsibility for their own work, they must act autonomously on the basis of their prior learning and experience, and they must individually generate key research results that contribute to the DAP.

Each student must individually contribute through assignment submissions, which are marked on their individual merits. The final mark on the course (as described below) consists of 50% for the individual research submissions, and 50% for the cohort's final project taken as a whole. The final project contains individual contributions related to the student’s specialisation, but requires teamwork, and is graded as a whole in terms of its fulfilment of the learning objectives.

Thus 15 ECTS worth of the course is based on individual work, and 15 ECTS is based on the collaborative work of the Cohort.

Cohorts

Cohorts are groups of about 5 students that are assigned to address a single business problem, on which they commit to working both individually and as a team. Cohort members are selected based on their area of specialisation. All cohorts must agree to a cohort charter, which outlines the roles and responsibilities of the team. The cohort charter must include the following topics: timeliness; comprehensive designation of areas of responsibility, including gathering meeting agenda items, chairing meetings, meeting note-taking, and being the point of contact for the cooperating organisation; a schedule of rotating leadership positions across the modules units, and a commitment to professional teamwork that prioritises the goal of the DAP. Cohorts are encouraged to address issues that arise within the group together. However, should intervention be necessary, their Woolf tutor will be available to resolve any problems or conflicts.

Tutors

All cohorts are assigned a Woolf tutor to facilitate three cohort tutorials for each unit, and all cohorts are assigned a designated contact person from a cooperating organisation.

The role of the tutor in cohort tutorials is to ensure that students are achieving the learning objectives and that the cohort is on course with their program roadmap. As the DAP progresses, students are expected to increase their management over the tutorial meetings, including setting the meeting agenda.

Cooperating organisations

Cooperating organisations must register and be verified with Woolf, provide an initial portfolio of basic information on the company, provide a designated contact person, and agree to the standard 'cooperating organisation framework' –which commits them to attend a minimum number of meetings with a cohort, and they are encouraged to provide students with access to the executive members of their organisation.

Additionally, it is expected that cooperating organisations provide an environment where students can engage with a variety of employees and departments where collaboration and communication are used to complete business tasks.

Students will work with the cooperating organisation on a relevant and specific, real, contemporary business consultancy problem. As such, the organisation should offer support when needed and provide a supervisor what is in direct contact with the student and Woolf faculty members. At the conclusion of the experience, the supervisor will provide a report to Woolf faculty addressing the outcome of the project and if the consultancy problem was resolved.

In cases where relations with a cooperating organisation become untenable for any reason, and the cohort is unable to continue with the relationship, then cohorts will be provided with the choice of (a) continuing their DAP without further input from the cooperating organisation, (b) switching to a new cooperating organisation, or (c) selecting a contemporary business problem on the basis of publicly available information and in agreement with their tutor.

DAP Timeline of Assignments

Each unit of the module normally requires about 75 hours of work from each member of the cohort. Individuals must complete their projects on schedule –neither early nor late –and in response to the requirements of their project; cohorts have the opportunity to adjust the amount of time dedicated to each unit.

The cohort meetings are an opportunity for the instructor to check in on the team's progress; they are a key checkpoint for individual submissions, and they provide milestones in the progress of the DAP. Before every cohort meeting, each student is required to submit a status report on individual and team performance.

At the end of the DAP, every cohort submits a Final Report, Final Presentation, and Final Reflection on their experience.

The Final Report consists of the following components:

1. Title, abstract, and table of contents

2. Industry and competition report

3. Report on the cooperating organisation

4. Report on the business problem

5. Report on the potential solutions analysing their merits and weakness

6. Recommended solution with an implementation plan

7. Full financial model

8. Bibliography

Items 2-7 (which may be adjusted in coordination with the cohort tutor), each have a Directly Responsible Individual (the DRI), who undertakes all the research for the section of the Final Report. Each DRI must elicit feedback and review from other members of the cohort, who must contribute feedback to every other section of the report.

The Final Presentation is typically a slide deck between 20 and 40 slides, and it is a fully collaborative project.

The Final Reflection is a reflective analysis on the DAP experience, and it must contain an individual report from each member and a joint concluding statement.

The course concludes with each member providing a peer review of their cohort peers, including strengths and areas of improvement.

The timeline of the course assignments is set by the cohort at the start, and adjusted in consultation with the tutor as the DAP progresses. The outline of assignment submissions is as follows:

Unit 1

Standard cohort charter discussed, revised, and agreed

Project timeline with designated areas of responsibility

Unit 2-3

Draft title and abstract for the final report

Industry information gathering

Draft report on the cooperating organisation

Draft report on the industry landscape

Unit 4-5

Problem and opportunity diagnose

Creative generation of varied potential solutions

Unit 6

Evaluation of potential solutions

Preliminary financial models of potential solutions

Unit 7-8

Recommended solution

Implementation plan

Unit 9-10

Final Report

Final Presentation

Final Reflection and cohort debrief

Peer evaluation

This course provides a strategic framework for executive leadership in the ever-evolving global tech landscape. It focuses on identifying emerging technology trends and developing strategies that ensure long-term success in dynamic, international business environments.

This course explores global branding and market positioning strategies across multiple business models, including B2B, B2C, B2G, and D2C. It provides insights into creating effective brand identities, customer engagement tactics, and market strategies that resonate in diverse international contexts, particularly for products, services, technology, and SaaS offerings.

This course focuses on equipping executives with the tools to adapt their leadership styles to diverse geographies, cultures, and organizational stages. It emphasizes transformative leadership as a means of driving social change, highlighting ethical decision-making, inclusivity, and the alignment of leadership strategies with both organizational goals and societal impact.