Postgraduate Courses

Communication skill ranks at the top of contributors to job effectiveness, satisfaction and success. Managerial communication gives students an opportunity to improve students' ability to communicate efficiently and effectively as a manager and to develop those critical communication capabilities that students will need as a business leader.

The practical study of managerial work. Examines communication skills and offers the opportunity for assessment and feedback. Organizational contexts, teambuilding and case work. This is a core course for MBA. Graded P or F.

Include motivation theories, leadership, group dynamics, job design, decision making, power and politics, organizational structure and design, and organizational change. This is a core course for MBA.

Problems faced by small firms and basic skills needed for developing new business, including entrepreneurial strategies, legal and financial considerations and effective new venture management.

Major techniques and approaches to the development and implementation of corporate strategies. Underlying concepts, analytical techniques, internal and external competitor analysis and evaluation of strategic options. This is a core course for MBA.

This course is designed to help managers build an effective workforce. First, students will take the perspective of the general manager. They will see how an effective general manager aligns people with other organizational processes to execute business strategy. Second, they will take the human resource executive's point of view by seeing how top human resource executives develop strategy. Third, they will see how managers throughout the company contribute to the development of an effective workforce.

The primary topic of this course is strategic management in the Chinese context. This course has three major objectives: 1) to help students understand the conditions under which different kinds of strategy have the potential to create economic value and competitive advantage for Chinese context; 2) to help students who plan to work in Chinese companies understand their roles and responsibilities in helping the companies to achieve competitive advantage; and 3)to help those, who work in foreign companies that either already have or will have operations in China, obtain the knowledge necessary to compete or cooperate with companies in Chinese context more successfully.

This is a course with an in-depth discussion on the nature of human thinking and judgment. The overall emphasis of this course will be on illustrating errors and biases in thinking and judgment and their managerial implications. In other words, the class is designed to give you a "rational mind". The concepts we will discuss are key to remove the obstacles in thinking, solving problems, and making decisions. Topics that we will focus on include Common Biases, Experts and Novices, Heuristics, Judgment under Uncertainty, Nonrational Escalation of Commitment, and the Psychology of Delaying Decisions.

This course will explore the immediate ability to contribute to top management's strategic conversations in students' current organization. It teaches how to think strategically and provides the opportunity to apply this thinking in a team environment. Students will be able to immediately apply the thinking and skills learnt to the current job.

This course focuses on two-party negotiations in a wide variety of settings ranging from simple buyer-seller bargains to complex, multiple-issue strategic relationships.

This course is designed to prepare business managers to succeed as members of a merger and acquisition project team. Students will be able to work out how merger and acquisition can help to achieve the strategy, to know how merger and acquisition transactions work in practice from search to merger integration, to get insight into the particular opportunities and challenges of merger and acquisition, and to apply this thinking in a team environment.

This course will help students have a better understanding of how China relates to the rest of the world, both historically and now. It will examine contemporary China's political and economic relations with the major countries and regions of the world, including the United States, Europe, Japan, India, Korea and Russia plus the developing countries in Africa as well as the territories of Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Great leaders and corporations take greater responsibilities for its customers, employees, shareholders, and society. This class is to learn what it takes to be a responsible leader and how leaders can create responsible corporations. This course also intends to change behavior for future leaders by teaching decision making framework for making responsible and ethical decisions as they face these challenges. Maybe graded PP.

This course is to help executives understand and analyze effective change implementation. The course emphasizes learning in action and provides tools, time and structure for executives to apply their learning to their own business situations. Drawing on theories and conceptual framework, this course focuses on practitioners' perspectives in considering the ways organizational change has occurred in real-world settings. In particular, the behavioural and implementation perspectives will be discussed. Graded P or F.

This course is designed for the study of a technology company the start up to IPO. The topics include human factor, the finance challenges, the go-to-market strategies, the failure and the pre-IPO anxiety. Graded P or F.

This course will help students reflect on their learning in the MBA program and prepare them for their leadership roles in the future. Graded P or F.

In this course, students will learn about the venture capital business, how venture capitalists spend their days, and how they think about business proposals. Even among the small proportion of opportunities that are possible matches for venture capital financing, very few are funded. Using actual cases and examples from venture firm portfolios, we will explore critical issues that get attention - both positive and negative - from the venture capitalist perspective.

This course helps you understand your strengths and development areas as a change agent. It then explores a model of change and the role of the change agent as a leader and influencer of others. An online simulation is used to help understand motivation and resistance in recipients of change. Finally, hands on practice is conducted for some key change agent competencies including creating a vision and communication.

This course will provide students with a broad overview of China's foreign policy and their economic ramifications. The country has transformed from one of the world's poorest countries into an engine of growth for the world economy. China has focused on economic development and its foreign policy is geared to further this national goal by ensuring a peaceful regional and global environment and by enhancing trade and investment between China and the rest of the world. Guest speakers will be invited to share their perspectives with students. Graded P or F.

This course will help students gain a better understanding of the dynamic economies of Southeast Asia and their potential as they achieve higher levels of economic integration through ASEAN. Graded P or F.

The purpose of this course is to help MBA students understand the political, socioeconomic and international environment of doing business in China. We will examine major changes in politics, economics and social life amidst three fundamental transformations since the late 1970s: marketization, privatization and internationalization. Graded P or F.

This course will address topics of: business activities and their impact on the environment; strategies firms have taken to include environment into their actions; how inclusion of environment in corporate strategy changes how we think about strategy; and the future of corporate sustainability. Additional topics may be included depending on timeliness and relevance, e.g. cleantech investment, renewable energies, mainland China policies. Graded P or F.

This course focuses on the key elements in implementing business transformation programs. It is structured around a framework that links strategic objectives to their effective implementation and includes the following key elements: 1. Clarifying organizational objectives and translating these to tangible measures of success 2. Identifying major drivers of opportunity including a focus on business processes 3. Developing a future state and its impact on an organization's people, processes, technology and infrastructure 4. Managing the change process in an organization including the importance of communication, employee engagement, performance management and implementing early successes 5. Challenges and priorities when implementing change

Social Entrepreneurship uses business methods to address social and environmental problems, often in innovative ways. Venture Philanthropy uses venture capital funding tools to promote start-up and growth of social ventures. This course combines lectures, case studies, industry expert guest speakers and project work to involve students in social entrepreneurship and venture philanthropy with real social impact as a result. Student teams work with social enterprise partners to develop a growth plan and funding proposal for grant funding to be awarded to one of the social venture partner organizations at the end of the course. The course is multi-disciplinary and open to MBAs and other PG/UG programs. (UG students please email instructor with CV and motivation letter for course admission.)

This course offers a practical, "real world" understanding of many aspects of managing a Venture Capital (VC) Fund. It provides an overview of the marketplace and includes such VC topics as: (1) VC personnel and compensation; (2) deal structuring; (3) due diligence and post-investment management; (4) valuation techniques; (5) negotiating investment term sheets; (6) going public and other divestment ("exit") strategies. Real world examples and cases, primarily from Asia, will be used to illustrate these topics. Students will see a VC Fund from several perspectives, including as the General Manager, as a promoter to the Fund of a new investment, as a potential investor, as the Head of an Investment Committee, as a prospective subsequent investor, as an entrepreneur, and as an entrepreneur seller.

This course specifically focuses on formulating and applying practical deal-making strategies to real-world transactions in the Asia Pacific region. This is a highly participatory and interactive course instead of purely lecture-style. Participants are asked to play the roles of deal makers -- which role may be as a lead negotiator, investor, investment banker, salesman, consultant, or investment advisor -- in pioneering transactions.

This course is intended for students who are exploring consulting as a career option or who want to be more effective at working out and communicating recommendations. This course will teach students the key skills that management consultants use to solve business problems. This will be a demanding case-based course where students will learn the tools, skills and approaches adopted in leading management consultancies.

The course will offer students very practical tools and simple models that can also be applied in a corporate environment to help transform groups into engaged, motivated and focused teams that perform. These capabilities are also highly relevant to leading virtual teams that only meet remotely. Graded P or F.

This course offers a practical, real world understanding of managing strategic alliances and joint ventures in China for students interested in understand the role of strategic alliances in contemporary strategic management in general and managing alliances/joint ventures in China in particular. Graded P or F.

The course intends to provide students with a framework for understanding elements that will shape the global trade system over the next five years. Students should expect to have greater ability to formulate effective strategies and policies on behalf of their companies or organizations which reflect emerging realities in the global trade system upon completing the course.

The course introduces students to one of the most original ways of developing strategy to appear in business thinking in recent years known as Blue Ocean Strategy. Blue Ocean Strategy was developed by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, both professors of strategy and management at the INSEAD business school. Their approach to strategy innovation is widely recognized as a significant step forward in strategic thinking and has been adopted by many companies to help them develop innovative strategy.

Advanced topics of current interest in human resources management.

Advanced topics of current interest in organizational behavior.

Advanced topics of current interest in Management.

Study of selected issues in organizational management under the supervision of a faculty member. (Special permission from the Associate Dean is required for MBA students to take this course.)

Master's thesis research supervised by a faculty member. A successful defense of the thesis leads to Pass. No course credit is assigned.

In-depth study of the foundations of behavioral science research using examples from organizational behavior and other related business disciplines.

Presentations and discussions of current research topics in Organizational Behavior and Human Resources Management for doctoral students.

Presentations and discussions of current research topics in organization theory and strategic management for doctoral students.

Presentations and discussions of current research topics in Behavioral Research Methods for doctoral students.

This is a research-oriented graduate level course on cognition. It introduces to doctoral students basic/philosophical and applied/practical topics on cognition. It offers the opportunity for students to integrate concepts in basic research on cognition with applied research in business. It offers the opportunity for students to understand scientific research methodology of studying cognition.

Original and independent doctoral thesis research. A successful defense of the thesis leads to the grade Pass. No course credit is assigned.