1st year : 12 Core Courses


First year: 12 Core courses form the basis of Management. As a rule, core courses must be completed during the first year of the EMBA cycle.

Participants who already completed a specialization will still need to settle the CHF 5'000.- enrollment / matriculation fee.

Contact: Mrs. Irene Galyfianakis
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (block format) | eThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (bi-weekly format)

2019-2020 CURRICULUM

- Leadership, Teamwork & Communication

Introduction course Objectives:

To introduce students to some of the behavioral patterns that are likely to impact on both their professional life and within the EMBA Program.

The course includes aspects such as perception, communication, decision-making and teamwork and explores these topics using a proactive teaching approach, with emphasis on case studies, and individual and group applications.

- Business Economics

Objectives: 
 
The course acquaints students with the main principles of Economics that will help them to understand the macroeconomic environment in which businesses are immersed. The course first analyzes the main mechanisms of a market economy. Participants become familiar with specific factors that can influence the behavior of consumers or producers in a particular market and the ways the market balance is affected by flawed competition. They also learn to use the data needed to predict the likely evolution of the economic environment.

- Financial Accounting

Objectives:

 

The course is designed to provide an in-depth understanding of financial accounting, which is essential to analyze the financial position of a company.  After having completed the course, participants will know how to prepare financial statements and related documents, how business transactions affect those statements, how to prepare journal entries. They will also have a first understanding of how to use financial reports to make business decisions. No prior knowledge of financial accounting is required.

- Financial Policy

Objectives: 

The course primarily focuses on corporate finance and investments in non-financial and financial assets, and the participants learn to determine if an investment project is financially viable. Strong emphasis is placed on Net Present Value and the development of business plans. The business plans are drawn up and analyzed on a case-by-case basis in class. The second part of the course looks at the principles behind developing an optimal financial portfolio. Participants will create their own portfolios and learn to calculate portfolio return and risk. The concept of value creation is explained by calculating the appropriate cost of capital for projects and corporates.

- Human Resources

Objectives:

  • To provide participants with a good grasp of the fundamental principles of Human Resource Management (HRM) as well as the challenges that come with it.
  • Particpants will learn about the theories underpinning effective HRM approaches, and the implications of HRM for managers. The course analyses HRM's main contributions and limitations.
  • Participants also learn to communicate with HR professionals in an effective manner.

- Interactive Strategizing

Objectives: 
 
The course focuses on the key elements needed to improve strategy development and strategy implementation and analyses frequent strategizing mistakes. Particular emphasis will be laid on communication issues in advancing strategy, as they have a major impact on the way strategies are both developed and executed. The course also aims to familiarize students with the benefits and potential risks of different visual methods of strategizing.

- Management Accounting

Objectives:
 
To highlight the benefits of Cost Accounting and provide students with the basic principles of Cost Systems and the most recent Management Control Systems. This seminar demonstrates the need to rationalize resources in a context of increased competitive pressure. New approaches, notably the ABC method, which leads to the recent balanced scorecards, will be explored from both a practical and a critical point of view. The course is highly interactive and is based mainly on case studies that help illustrate our analyses.

- Marketing

Objectives:
 
Marketing Management is the art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping, and growing customers through creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value.  Marketing management seeks to meet organizational objectives by effectively satisfying customers in a dynamic environment. 
This course provides an overview of marketing processes and marketing principles, and provides students with the opportunity to apply the key concepts to practical business situations. Further students will be provided with the knowledge and tools necessary that enable them to adopt a marketing perspective, to build a strategy, and to define its implementation. More specifically, students should:
  • Understand the role of marketing within the firm’s business strategies;
  • Develop a structured approach to the analysis of marketing problems;
  • Foster an appreciation for the value of marketing concepts in understanding management problems and developing comprehensive marketing programs;
  • Appreciate how the elements of a successful marketing program fit together;
  • Expand decision-making skills by making and defending marketing decisions in the context of realistic problem situations with incomplete information.

- Organization Design

Objectives:
  • To analyze various management options to meet the organizational challenges in contemporary businesses.
  • Classical approaches as well as more contemporary approaches are explored in pursuit of the best suited organizational processes.
  • The course deals with the overall organization, structures, decision-making mechanisms, coordination, communication, the contingency factors as well as their impact on the merit of an organization.
  • Management structures and operations are studied both at the unit level and at the level of the company as a whole.

- Responsible Leadership

Objectives:

Tough competition and high performance pressures are pervasive features of the business and professional environment. Whereas some people regard such conditions primarily as drivers for hard work and innovation, others regard them as drivers of moral transgressions and personal resentment; and both sides have a point. Therefore, to minimize the negative and maximize the positive consequences of the contemporary business environment, there are increasing calls for responsible leaders.

However, what distinguishes responsible from irresponsible leaders, and how do responsible leaders actually manage to overcome the adverse effects of a tough business environment? Instead of providing broad-brushed and prefabricated answers to such intricate questions, this course offers a platform for reflection about the practical challenges that employees and managers face in their professional life. Each session of the course centers around a hands-on case study, involves interactive class discussions, and is enriched with key insights from different academic disciplines, like management, psychology, and ethics. As such, the course will help and guide participants in finding their own answers to what leading responsibly means at their workplace.

After the course, it is likely that many participants will neither regard responsible leadership as the single and all-encompassing solution for all kinds of problems in business and society, nor as the expression of wishful thinking that cannot be found in professional settings. Instead, participants might argue that people who lead responsibly can be found in many organizations and levels of hierarchy, just as people leading irresponsibly can be found in most such settings too. The spirit of the course, thus, is that employees and managers who lead responsibly are not necessarily exceptionally successful and morally superior saints, but simply people who do a good job while keeping intact their moral compass—although they are not free of mistakes either. Thereby, those who lead responsibly make a positive contribution to those around them, even if such a contribution is just a modest one.

Upon completion of this course, students should:

- Know the key challenges and approaches for responsibly leading a team and single subordinates
- Be aware of the value-based implications of everyday behaviors and decisions for an organization’s culture as well as its key stakeholders
- Reflect about competing demands in organizations, and the resulting challenge for being responsible towards oneself, one’s colleagues, as well the organization and/or society as a whole

- Risk Management

Objectives:
 
Given the increasing complexity of operating procedures within firms, managers must resort more and more to decision support tools. These tools, based on a management decision model, involve various stages: data collection, creation and computerizing of quantitative models, and interpretation and communication of results. Unlike other approaches, this course focuses on the application rather than the theoretical aspect of these methods. Four themes will be presented on the basis of case studies: the decision-making in uncertain environment, simulation, optimization, and forecasting.

- Self Leadership

Objectives: 
 
Help students reflect on their career paths and vantage of their EMBA. This will allow students to: 
  • focus on their development in order to better manage the learning curve all throughout their studies;
  • gain a better understanding of their skills and positively project themselves into their future profession, and more globally, into their career;
  • build a clear action plan on how to get the most out of their EMBA.  

- Strategic management

Objectives:

This course deals with the craft of strategy – that is, how to analyze a company’s environment, how to select the right strategy, and how to construct the organizational context to implement the chosen strategy.  We will address the following main areas: 

  • Competitive Strategy: Strategic Analysis and Strategy Development
  • Corporate Strategy: Growth Objectives, Growth Paths, and Growth Modes
  • Strategy Execution: Organization and Leadership 

As an outcome of this course, participants are expected to acquire knowledge, skills, and sensitivities that will help them manage effectively in a business environment. Since virtually all organizations have to deal with strategic management in one form or another, this course is intended for students interested in pursuing general management positions in almost any type of organization.

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