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 deepen and extend their ability to create and

maintain high-quality relationships with people who come from a wide

range of backgrounds and possess different points of view in order to

create and execute processes that produce successful outcomes and

results.

This module teaches business managers and leaders to reflect critically on

concepts from the behavioural sciences that can be applied to a fast

changing business environment to improve their abilities to lead and

manage in organisations.

Behavioural frameworks for individuals, teams, and organisations are

evaluated critically and discussed in the context of real-world cases.

tutorial groups provide practice in problem-based teamwork,

communicating in specialist and non-specialist registers, and in applying

the frameworks in practice.

In this module students will deepen and cultivate their capacity to reflect

continually on their learning and growth; they will examine the ways in

which one’s behaviours and decision-making impact others, with a goal of

leading with integrity.

This module is designed to deepen and extend students' conceptual and

practical understanding of leadership in organisations, extending beyond

the application of knowledge in practical judgements that achieve

business outcomes, to embrace wider social and ethical considerations.

The module is experiential and multidisciplinary, requiring participants to

reflect on the social and ethical responsibilities of leaders in relation to

their own experiences. It is designed to help students discover insights

about themselves as leaders, fostering the development of a self-

awareness, including strengths and opportunities for personal growth.

In addition, the module provides a context for enhancing the skills and

competencies that enable a student to become an effective leader in

today's highly dynamic, diverse and adaptive organisation.

In general terms, financial accounting is the measurement of economic

activity for decision-making. Financial statements are a key product of

this measurement process and an important component of firms’ financial

reporting activities.

The objective of this module is to help students become intelligent readers

of the financial reports of most publicly traded companies. Students will

learn the development, analysis, and use of these reports by focusing on

what these reports contain, what assumptions and concepts accountants

use to prepare them, and why they use those assumptions and concepts. A

solid understanding of the fundamentals covered in this module should

enable students to do well in more advanced finance and accounting

courses and to interview intelligently for jobs in finance, consulting, and

general management.

The module begins with the basic concepts of accounting. Students will

analyse the main financial statements: balance sheet, income statement,

statement of cash flows, and statement of stockholders’ equity. Particular

attention is paid to how these four statements relate to each other and

how they provide information about the operating performance and

financial health of a company. The module also covers specific items from

the financial statements and applies tools of analysis whenever possible.

Managers require a broad array of negotiating skills to implement business solutions – this requires advanced knowledge of negotiation models, the competence to select the right strategy, and the tactical skills to achieve desired outcomes through negotiation In addition to studying key negotiation theories, the module develops skills in negotiation, providing students with the opportunity to test and improve their abilities through discussions that model negotiation scenarios, through the use of case studies, and through reflection and feedback. Students will review and test various approaches to negotiated conflict

resolution (at small personal scales and large organisational scales). The

module builds competencies in developing an effective professional and

personal style of negotiation.

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 explores the key concepts of marketing and how they fit into

the larger context of management strategy and operational decisions. It

presents both the practical 'how' and the fundamental 'why' of marketing

activities in the light of contributions from behavioural science,

economics, and statistics. The module provides managers and business

leaders with the understanding needed to manage and lead those who

implement the marketing activities; the module provides concepts and

processes for business leaders that seek to continue developing through

future experiences or coursework in marketing.

The module then focuses on managing processes. Theoretically, it models

business functions as a network of actions that convert inputs into

outputs. Process design is considered, including the volume and variety of

system inputs and outputs - especially with respect to goods and services.

Different inventory management and logistic systems are explored.

Finally, forecasting and process optimisation are explored, strengthening

managers ability to operate with finite resources.

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.

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 competences, focussing 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.

In this module, students will develop specialised and multidisciplinary

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 that

keep 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.

Throughout the module, students will study various tools for generating

marketing insights from data in such areas as segmentation, targeting and

positioning, satisfaction management, customer lifetime analysis,

customer choice, product and price decisions using conjoint analysis, and

text analysis, and search analytics.

The focus of this module is to introduce concepts, skills, and strategies for

performing competitively in the business market where organisations

rather than households are the customers.

This module provides a managerial introduction to the strategic and

tactical aspects of business marketing decisions and marketing channel

strategy. Students examine the strategic concepts and tools that guide

market selection, successful differentiation in business markets, and

supply chain management. Students will examine how product and

service decisions are designed to deliver the B2B value proposition, how

pricing captures customer value, how value is communicated to and

among customers, and how marketing channels are used to make this

value accessible to target customers. Additionally, students will compare

and contrast how the strategic and tactical processes of developing and

managing value-generating relationships differ between B2B and B2C

markets. Moreover, students will also gain an understanding of how to

manage channel power, conflict, and relationships.

This module examines specific issues involved in building and managing

global brands in such a way that they contribute to shareholder value. A

global brand uses the same name and logo and has awareness, availability,

and acceptance in multiple regions of the world. It shares the same

strategic principles, values, positioning, and marketing throughout the

world. Although the marketing mix can vary, it is managed in an

internationally coordinated manner.

Throughout this module, students will develop skills related to building

strong global brands; developing marketing mix strategies that are an

effective combination of global standardisation, local adaptation, and

worldwide learning; and managing global brands.

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.