Miami Campus

Global Corporate Restructuring
This course covers ventures, family businesses, closely held firms and corporate restructuring transactions in an international context. Students analyze different corporate restructuring strategies including mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, spin-offs and leveraged buyouts. The course integrates corporate governance and agency dimensions, financial and strategic management aspects, and legal and accounting considerations into a unified framework for investigating issues in unlocking hidden values for all stakeholders involved. In addition, the course explores issues involved in negotiating deals and in formulating deal structures that enhance value.

Leading High Impact Teams
This course examines the design, management, and leadership of teams in organizational settings. The focus is on the interpersonal processes and structural characteristics that influence the effectiveness of teams, the dynamics of intra-team relationships, and sharing knowledge and information in teams. The purpose of this course is to understand the theory and processes of group and team behavior so that leaders can successfully work with teams. Students who take advantage of everything this course has to offer will become comfortable and adept in leading and managing groups and teams.

This course is designed to complement the technical and diagnostic skills learned in the other courses at Kellogg. A basic premise is that the manager needs analytic skills as well as interpersonal skills to effectively manage groups. The course will provide students with the opportunity to develop these skills experientially and to understand team behavior in useful analytical frameworks.

1.Experiential Learning: During each class, students will engage in an experiential team challenge pertaining to a key aspect of building, maintaining, and designing teams.
2.Feedback & Self-Examination: During each class, the instructor will lead a debrief that involves analyzing students’ performance. And, on several occasions, students will receive personalized feedback on various dimensions of teamwork styles and approaches.
3.Applied Learning: Each week, the professor will introduce a theory or model and students will be encouraged to apply the model to: (1) the analysis of their own team’s performance in class; (2) their own work teams in real organizational settings.

Leading Organizational Transformation
This course takes the perspective of chief executives who operate at “height and scale.” It explores what management and leadership look and feel like when you oversee 1,000 to 100,000 people and $500M to billions in revenue. How do you lead when you are only one person and you can’t “do” the work of the organization yourself, you can only steer the course of those who do?

To make this perspective concrete, we will start by identifying five growth archetypes commonly found in large organizations.

With this orienting framework in hand, we will study the four key levers that leaders have available to them for shaping and strengthening the large, complex organizations they lead and how these change across the archetypes. These include:

• Building your senior leadership team
• Setting an organizational growth agenda
• Building out strategic communications capabilities
• Understanding and leveraging your own social capital

Leader Development Models and Practices
This course concentrates on how we as leaders in organizations can develop team members to realize their potential. Growing others’ talents helps managers to accomplish the mission and improve their organizations. The course integrates theories and frameworks associated with constructs related to organizations, leadership, and adult development in order to provide you a more complete understanding of how leaders are nurtured. By the end of the course, you will be able to more cogently analyze and address team members’ developmental needs and situations.

Creating and Managing Strategic Alliances
In a world characterized by global competition, increased technological change, and intensified resource constraints, firms are increasingly using cooperative relationships with other organizations as an essential tool for achieving their overall strategic objectives. However, both large and small corporations are finding that successful “strategic alliances” are often difficult to achieve. Creating and Managing Strategic Alliances (CMSA) examines the theory and practice of creating and managing different types of strategic alliances, such as joint ventures, licensing agreements, buyer-supplier partnerships, and consortia.

This course will enable the student to better understand the costs and benefits of strategic alliances (and why such alliances may be preferred over other strategies such as internal development or mergers and acquisitions). In addition, the course covers how to design alliances, and how to avoid the many potential problems and complications in managing these relationships. The course also provides a framework for managing the complex but increasingly common situation in which organizations are involved in multiple alliances. CMSA should prove useful for students interested in understanding the role of strategic alliances in contemporary strategic management.

Family Enterprises: Success and Continuity
This course is intended for those from business-owning families, whether they work in the family business or not. Topics range from values driven culture, to succession and family vision and dynamics, to continuity planning, leadership and strategic performance and family constitutions and business governance. The course is also appropriate for those who have family foundations, family investment companies and/or family office.

Investment Banks, Hedge Funds and Private Equity
This course focuses on private equity (LBO funds) and hedge funds, their influence on corporate decision-making, and measures taken to counter threats and exploit opportunities represented by these investors. Competition and cooperation between investment banks, LBO funds and hedge funds will also be analyzed. Finally, post-financial crisis changes in regulations governing these institutions will be considered. The course uses six Kellogg cases to facilitate discussion regarding hedge fund and LBO fund investment strategies, and corporate initiatives to either keep these investors at bay or utilize them to enhance shareholder value.

Strategic Marketing Decisions
Business simulations are one of the best ways to learn; simulations are challenging, engaging and fun. In the Strategic Marketing Decisions course, you will participate in one of the most famous marketing simulations, Markstrat. Working with your global team, you will manage a company, launch brands, work with P&Ls and study competitors. During the simulation you will also develop and implement marketing plans. You will build your skills in developing strategy, influencing a team and creating powerful plans. This is not an easy course but it is certainly memorable; many students say it is a highlight of the MBA program.

Selling Yourself and Your Ideas
We spend much more time selling ourselves and our ideas than we think we do. And we have an increasing number of communications methods at our disposal. Being a powerful communicator means developing the agility to adjust your message, content, approach and style based on the method of communication you are using. It also means having a keen understanding your audience, their expectations, and what success looks like. The overarching goal of our Selling Yourself & Your Ideas course will be to have an immediate positive impact on your outcomes by equipping you with a set of critical communications insights, skills, disciplines and tools to help you become a great communicator, in any setting. The course will address six main methods of communication; conversation, written communication, meetings, networking, presentations and social media. We will explore the distinctions between these various methods and explore what research has suggested about what high performance looks like in each. Finally, we will drill down into the requisite skills and disciplines in each of these situations by discussing how to ask “impact” questions, handle objections and conflict, give (and receive) feedback, tell the right story at the right time for the right reasons, and other elements of powerful, crisp communications. Throughout the course, you will build a personal Communications Toolkit through iterative practice and feedback. An initial assessment, case studies, one-on-one and group assignments, and real world examples are raised to confront students with scenarios for practice and peer collaboration.

Strategy Beyond Markets
All economic systems are defined by “rules of the game:” laws, regulations, and implicit norms of behavior that structure market competition. Examples include: antitrust legislation; regulatory compliance requirements; privacy regulation and norms; intellectual property rules; product liability rules; barriers to exports; etc.

Successful companies excel at reacting to, and influencing, these rules. Disney, for example, successfully lobbied to extend the duration of copyright protection, thus prolonging its exclusive ownership of the Mickey Mouse character. In another example, Monsanto has long been seeking to overcome European Union regulatory barriers to genetically modified crops. Often, success in these “non-market” endeavors is critical for sustaining market competitiveness of a single firm or of a whole industry.

In this class you will learn how to think strategically about the rules of the game, and how to make the rules of the game work for your company.

Incentives, Strategy, and Organization
People respond to incentives and they do so in predictable ways. Starting with this simple premise, this course then asks how managers can design incentives to get employees to do what they want them to do. The goal of the course is to offer a micro-economic approach to both the internal organization of firms and its relationship with the firms’ overall strategies.

Topics include the design of pay for performance contracts, which have increased labor productivity by almost 50% in some firms, but also caused significant problems in others. Another major topic is decentralization and the tools that can be used to manage the problems that often arise in decentralized firms. For instance, transfer prices can facilitate decentralization if designed appropriately, but also exacerbate problems if not. The course is structured around an equal number of lectures and case discussions. Case discussions may include classic cases such as Lincoln Electric and Arthur Andersen, and more recent cases such as Timken.

World Economy
The world economy is undergoing a period of very rapid change. Understanding this change is essential to make sound investment decisions that position companies for future profitability. In this course we study the most important business regions in the world, including the U.S., Europe, Japan, China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa. The goal of this course is to provide students with a working knowledge of the economic drivers, challenges and opportunities that are present in these regions. The course also discusses the performance of equity and bond markets in different countries and the economic forces underlying oil and other commodity markets.