Core courses
View the flowchart of course prerequisites
Contemporary Management Skills
This course is designed to lay the foundation for the development of knowledge and skills to pursue a managerial career. This knowledge and these skills are expected to be fostered and upgraded through teaching and learning as well as assessment in subsequent MBA courses.
The course begins by exposing students to the transition that they go through to take up a management role in their chosen career. The skills and resources needed to make the transition successfully are explored in terms of Katz's classic typologies of technical, human and conceptual skills.
The course serves as a formal introduction for new students commencing post graduate tertiary education and provides context for the aims, objectives, common themes and methodologies which are applied throughout the MBA program.
Creative and Accountable Marketing
This course will give an overview of how markets operate, the contribution of marketing thinking and the role of the marketing function appropriate to contemporary organisations.
Core issues that will be covered in the course include how markets actually work, the marketing concept, the marketing management process, market orientation and profitability, market based performance, how firms relate to their markets, customer analysis and value creation, marketing in a social service arena, market segmentation, product/service decisions, market-based pricing, marketing communications and customer response, market based assets, gaining and using market intelligence, the benefits and pitfalls of market research, dealing with competition, marketing strategic analysis, strategy implementation and performance metrics, global marketing issues.
Leading and Managing People
Leading and Managing People is concerned with managers as leaders and the strategic leadership of people. In our present turbulent environment firms require strategies for maximising the human resource contribution from all employees to sustain their organisation's competitive advantage. This course aims to explore some of the key factors that influence people's performance and behaviour in organisations from a perspective that draws upon leadership, organisational behaviour and HR literature. Core concepts include the strategic HRM, employee relations, human resource development, e-business, diversity, social responsibility and changing employee relations.
Accounting for Decision Making
Accounting for Decision Making has been designed to provide students with the skills and knowledge to be able to utilise accounting information to improve their performance as managers. The course assumes that participants have not previously studied accounting. In the course we aim to develop the skills necessary for students to understand, evaluate and make the best possible use of accounting information. These skills will be developed through an initial understanding of the principles, processes and techniques involved in preparing financial reports and other accounting information.
Students will then develop an appreciation of management accounting and the significance for business managers of understanding costs, cost systems, budgets, control systems and financial decision making principles. We include a focus on contemporary issues within the discipline so that students are in tune with, or ahead of, accounting developments within their organisations. And finally, our delivery approach aims to enable students to share practical experiences of a range of accounting issues with class colleagues.
Leadership Dynamics
To provide students with a framework for exploring the complexity of the leadership and management challenges within contemporary organisations. This course is designed to draw attention to the critical factors of personal and team functioning and their relationship to successful business enterprises.
Managerial Finance
This course builds on the basic principles and knowledge acquired in the Accounting course. The aims of the course are to develop an understanding of the key theories upon which corporate finance is based, and a mastery of the skills required to apply analytical techniques from finance in real world financial decision-making situations.
Competitive Strategy
This course examines how organizations can create sustainable competitive advantage. It focuses on factors that determine an organisation's success, including industry-specific and country-specific factors as well as organisational resources and capabilities, and how appropriate strategies can be formulated, implemented and evaluated through the use of various analytical and assessment tools.
Managerial Economics
The objective of managerial economics is to explore how economic theory and decision science tools can assist in the formulation of optimal solutions to managerial decision problems. The course applies many familiar concepts from economics such as demand and cost, monopoly and competition, the allocation of resources and economic trade-offs, level of economic activity, macro-economic policy, and the impact of globalisation. Students will also acquire quantitative skills in business and economic forecasting. At the end of the course, students should be able to use these analytical tools within the economic framework on real-world business applications.
International Business
This course aims to provide students with the knowledge and skills to manage a business in the international arena and to familiarise them as managers and leaders with the range of strategies available to compete more effectively in today's rapidly emerging global economy.
Sustainable Corporate Strategy
This course examines strategy formulation and implementation at the corporate level with emphasis on sustainability. It builds on the Competitive Strategy course by focusing on strategic actions at the corporate level of multi-business firms. The course also explores the role of a business firm in society and the nature, problems and prospects of corporate social responsibility.