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Elective courses

Elective courses offered by IGSB vary from year to year, reflecting the most contemporary issues in the business and management environment. The following are some of the more popular choices preferred by current IGSB program participants.

Business in China Intensive School

MBA Participants will receive credit for two electives towards their MBA as a result of completing all the academic requirements of the Business in China Intensive School.

The Business in China Intensive School has been designed to provide participants with skills, knowledge and experiences to be able to interact with the China market with depth and breadth of understanding around Eastern and Western management values. These skills, knowledge and experiences will be developed through an initial understanding of the principles, processes and values involved in Business in China.

Through a series of lectures, workshops, readings and assessment tasks spread over the two week period of the tour, participants will develop an appreciation of management principles appropriate in China and the significance for business managers of understanding variations between Eastern and Western business values and practices.

We include both the Eastern and Western focus on contemporary issues within most management disciplines, so that you are in tune with, or ahead of, developments within the China business market. And finally, our delivery approach aims to enable you to share practical experiences of a range of issues with your tour colleagues.

The Business in China Intensive School will equip participants with a systematic framework to make sense of, and take advantage of, the political, cultural, financial, legal, industry and market factors that influence the way business is conducted in China.

To ensure these objectives are met, and that participants have developed the requisite skills and knowledge arising from the tour, assessment will be rigorous and ongoing. The course curriculum has been designed around contemporary research related to Business in China.

Interested students (for April 2009), are encouraged to register their interest online.

Registrations have now closed for the April 2008 Intensive School.

Business Process Improvement

As companies have strived to deliver greater value from their service operations and supply chains, they have developed improvement initiatives based on an understanding of the mechanics of business processes. The tools, methods and change management issues have collectively become known as Business Process Improvement (BPI). BPI is an umbrella term covering such concepts as operational excellence, lean production and service, quality and process management, and “doing more with less”. This course examines the similarities and differences in BPI approaches across the five popular process movements of Total Quality Management, Process Re-engineering, Benchmarking, Lean and Six-Sigma. BPI initiatives should be positioned within a strategic framework. The course provides an in-depth treatment of strategy-led Balanced Scorecards and shows how the use of metrics and dashboards aligned with business strategy provides for optimisation of BPI initiative.

Enhancing Customer Value Through Quality

This course is focussed at the operational level of an organisation’s strategy - on the achievement of excellence and efficiency within an organisation’s operations. Several labels have evolved in the academic literature for this and related subjects - the key ones being quality management, total quality management (TQM), quality service, and service excellence.

Managing Cultural Challenges

This course is based upon the recognition that the management practices within organisations are no longer shielded behind national barriers and operate in a global context.

During this course, students will be given the opportunity to develop multiple perceptions of the implications for managers in managing within a cross cultural environment.

The course will explore the basic concepts and theories which are relevant, and their limitations, to provide a platform of understanding for experiential comparisons.

Fundamental Concepts of Sustainable Business

This course provides a rigorous historical and conceptual analysis of sustainability as it applies to business enterprise. It analyses the way in which the concept of sustainability has developed in the literature over the past four decades ; the parallel emergence of sustainability challenges in the global business environment, including issues of energy, water, biodiversity, climate change, social impacts and the carbon constrained economy; the theoretical challenges mounted by sustainability concepts to theories of the firm, with a particular focus on the concepts and values associated with 'externalities' and 'corporate social responsibility'; the evolution of community and business attitudes to sustainability, embedded in the concept of the 'license to operate' in the developed world, particularly in Australia, Europe and the United States over the past four decades; sustainability trends in India and China; the impacts of sustainability concepts on the core functions of business, including strategy development, marketing, finance and accounting, operations, and organisational development, and the multidisciplinary theoretical foundations of the principles and practice of sustainable business.

Climate Change and Corporate Management

This course presents a comprehensive introduction to the changes in the global business environment presented by climate change and considers their implications for corporate management. It includes an overview of the current assessment of climate science developed by international centres, focusing on physical and social impacts, mitigation strategies and projections to 2100; the history and current status of attempts by the international community to meet the challenge of climate change, through such mechanisms as the Kyoto Protocol, with its critiques, and the responses of the major international emitters, and detailing the climate debate in Australia; the emergence of the first Emissions Trading Scheme in Europe, with an assessment of its achievements and problems, and a discussion of ways in which the ETS might be reconfigured to meet these shortfalls; the emerging business discipline of carbon management, including the measurement and management of the carbon footprint generated by a company's operations, the financial options opening for the company with emerging emissions trading schemes, and the interaction of companies with government regulation, including carbon taxes; and the significant change to the external business environment produced by climate change, with it's strategic reconfigurations, for such major industry sectors as utilities, energy, resources, agribusiness, manufacturing and financial services.

Entrepreneurship and Innovation

This course will cover topics relating to the study of the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial process, opportunity recognition and exploitation culminating in the preparation of a professional business plan.

The study of entrepreneurship is less than 20 years old as a popular business school discipline and has grown tremendously in scope and importance over the past 5 years. This is largely due to the explosion in new technologies that relate to almost every field of human interest, especially communications, materials, information processing, biotechnology and medical science. The driving force behind the development of these new technologies has often been the entrepreneurs in all their forms, such as the "lone hero" pursuing a dream which often originated from the desire for independence or a tightly knit team of adventurers working in the traditional "garage". Quite often, the entrepreneurs have been people within large organisations who have been given the freedom by far sighted superiors to pursue a dream and have proceeded to act as intrapreneurs.

In addition to the traditional view of the entrepreneur as the developer of new enterprises, the reality of operating a business in the current fast moving business environment means that all CEO's need to think and act entrepreneurially. Therefore we can say that the study of entrepreneurship is just as much the study of the function of the CEO in firms of all sizes, as it is the study of the small, high growth business and the individual who is prepared to take a calculated risk to create a new business venture.

Contemporary Issues in Project and Operations Management

The aim of this course is to foster among students an appreciation of the importance and fit of operations as a major strategic element of an organisation and be equipped to undertake projects. The course objective is to develop students' understanding of operations and project management activities within both traditional manufacturing/distribution companies and within non-manufacturing (service) environments including an understanding of the strategic importance and fit of operations and project activities within the organisation.

Management Research and Consulting

Management Research and Consulting establishes an applied and conceptual framework for the practice of management consulting. Participants will analyse the nature of the consulting industry and will identify key roles and essential skills of the internal and external consultant. The consulting firm practice will be examined from the perspectives of establishment and management and from the viewpoint of the nature of its consultancy projects (advisory, research, contract outsourcing, technical design and installation). Techniques for identifying, contacting and formally engaging with clients and maintaining effective communication networks will be discussed. The role of the consultant as a researcher will be emphasised. Participants will study philosophical and paradigmatic issues in management research and will identify the phases of a research project. A range of methodological approaches to data collection and analysis, synthesis of solutions and modelling techniques involving statistical and soft systems methodology tools will expose students to the strengths and uses of quantitative and qualitative research methods. Course participants will develop strategies for reporting consultancy and management research outcomes as well as designing consultancy evaluation instruments.

Contemporary Issues in Managing Change

The course enables students to understand the change process and manage change effectively, by equipping them with a working knowledge of the change management literature, an understanding of the political processes involved in managing change, the skills to construct a change management plan for future action, and the ability to modify the plan as required.

Risk Management

Understanding and managing risk are two essential activities in our personal and working lives. Each person and each organisation do these activities in their own, and often unique, way. Every decision and action undertaken has an amount of risk, and similar amounts of reward and loss. Relatively high risks can gain large rewards or suffer large losses. To successfully manage over time we need to understand risk and be ready to balance possible loss (risk) against possible reward (opportunity). In managing organisations this balance is more basic. Management is focused on ensuring desired outputs and outcomes are achieved: Risk (is) Management. This course introduces four elements to form a clear picture of risk. First, a concise history of risk helps explain the current perceptions and beliefs about risk. Second, a succinct exploration of the fundamental principles and practices in risk management leads to an understanding of approaches used in risk evaluation and management. Third, a look at field or tactical risk and strategic risk enables a better grasp of the complex interaction of risk, environment and management. Finally, a brief look at emergent issues in risk management, from embedded failure in complex systems through to evolving sustainable organisations, helps identify likely future issues and trends in risk management. By the end of this course, participants emerge with a more systematic insight into the excitement, challenge and need to be ready to manage risk and gain desired rewards and outcomes.

European Summer School for Advanced Management (ESSAM)

MBA participants can choose to study in Europe during July through IGSB's membership of ESSAM, a consortium of seven outstanding business schools, including the IGSB, from around the world. In a dynamic, globalised world, ESSAM is designed to prepare executives for business in a modern international environment of free-flowing communication and diverse cultural backgrounds. Based in one of Denmark's most beautiful and historic cities, Aarhus, this course is undertaken in two weeks and is very demanding. This course has a central theme each year and in 2005 the focus was sustainable corporate development.

Additional electives

There are over 30 elective courses offered by other postgraduate programs within the University that participants may select. These electives are available in areas such as:

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