MBA Essentials Program Overview
Because classes start at 6:00 and stretch to 9:00 in the evening, food is catered for each session, easing the time-crunch for participants.
The following sessions are taught by world-class and experienced faculty members from the KU School of Business.
Personal Profiles
James P. Guthrie
Overview
Management and leadership are essentially social influence processes – the ability to “get things done through others.” Your effectiveness in this process is largely influenced by personality – a consistent pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving. Personality has a substantial influence on subordinates’ and superiors’ evaluations of your managerial effectiveness. Moreover, the importance of personality for success and effectiveness increases as you progress in your careers. Thus, your success as a manager and leader will be enhanced by deepening your understanding of your personality profile. This session provides an overview of the importance of personality in the workplace and provides feedback on participants’ profiles.
Course Topics
- What is personality?
- Measuring Personality: The Right and Wrong Instruments
- Modern Personality Assessment
- Personality and Work Outcomes
- Implications for Managerial and Leadership Success
- Participants' Profiles
- "I Yam What I Yam" - the importance of self-knowledge and self-insight
Laura Poppo
Overview
Successful people often confront obstacles to making their dreams come true. Colleagues and bankers laughed at Michael Burton when he quit his lucrative consulting job and vowed to turn his snow-surfing concept into a popular sport; Atari and Hewlett-Packard rejected Steve Jobs when he attempted to get them interested in his personal computer idea; Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team; and the only job offered to Sandra Day O’Conner after graduating from law school was as a legal secretary. These are just a few examples of people who led themselves to overcome the ‘can’ts’ in their lives. They followed their inner voices and kept forging ahead until their dreams and ideas became a reality. In this course you will learn strategies and skills to lead yourself toward living your goals and dreams. This is a personal activity/exercise driven course that will allow you to identify and practice self-leadership strategies. The underlying management principle is “First your need to learn to lead yourself, and then you will be in a solid position to effectively lead others.”
Course Topics
• Self-Leadership Inventory
o Identity your strengths and opportunities that you currently have as a self-leader.
• Skills and Strategies
o Self-reward: What kinds of reward do you use? How and when to you reward yourself?
o Avoid self-punishment: What are the activities or habits then bring on guilt? Can you develop rewards for substitute behaviors?
o Cues: Can you focus on the positive cues in your life and avoid the negative ones?
o Self-Goal Setting: To lead you have to know where you are going!
o The Power of Positive Thinking: Positive affirmations engage your mind, a powerful tool that can help you proactively develop necessary skills, attitudes, and beliefs.
o Self-observation: Enables you to consciously adjust and change your behavior
• Putting it all together
o Drafting a Self-Leadership Vision and Credo
Cooperation and Survival
Bill Beedles
Overview
The word “cooperation” provokes clichés in all of us: “win-win,” “synergy,” “2 +2 = 5.” In a business setting, cooperation takes on a special meaning, with specific thinking skills and vocabulary. This session involves a highly-interactive, hands-on group experiment that will reveal, through self-discovery, the meaning of cooperation for each of us individually, our peers, and our businesses. To make the learning from the experiment real and useful for our every day decisions, it will be debriefed with a series of increasingly complex case applications.
Course Topics
• Why it’s hard to make money with:
o Exceptional People
o Incentives
• Making money by cooperating: An experiment
o Market Signals
o Competition and Cooperation
o Lessons and Experiences
• Implementation
o Diagnosing Behavior
o Cases
o We’re all CEOs!
Strategic Planning
Thomas M. Jindra
Overview
Effective organizations begin with a plan that is premised on strategic objectives. The purpose of this session is to prepare the participants for the process of strategic planning. The session provides a special emphasis on situation analysis and the role that it plays in developing business level strategy.
Course Topics
- Introduction to Business Level Strategy
- Competitive Positioning
- External Analysis
- Benchmarking and "Best Practices"
- Integrating Business and Organizational Strategy
- Develop an effective business strategy for a business
- Apply competitive positioning to leverage competitive advantage in the marketplace.
- Integrate elements of the external environment in strategic positioning
- Enhance business potential through business value chain analysis and "Best Practices" comparisons
- Define gaps in strategic positioning and develop effective strategies to overcome them.
- Link organizations to overall business strategy to maximize potential.
James P. Guthrie
Overview
Expertise in managing human capital is an essential component of success in today’s dynamic marketplace. This session has a simple, yet powerful purpose: To highlight human resource principles and practices maximizing employee commitment and productivity and, in turn, sustained organizational success. It will provide you with a conceptual framework for thinking about human capital management from a strategic perspective. Equally important, it will provide you with techniques – and illustrative company examples -- for implementing this framework.
Course Topics
• Hiring the Best: Processes & Practices for Assessing and Hiring Productive Employees
o Identifying Competency Requirements
o Assessing Job Candidates’ Competencies
• Peak Performance: Processes & Practices for Managing Performance
o Getting Everyone Rowing in the Same Direction
o Preferred Methods for Performance Evaluation
• Room to Grow: Processes and Practices for Developing Employees
o Identifying Employee Developmental Opportunities
o Evaluating Developmental Efforts
o Developing Executive Talent and Successors
• Paying People: Processes and Practices for Compensating and Rewarding Employees
o Developing a Pay Structure
o Pay-for-Performance
• Putting it All Together: A System of HR Processes and Practices
o The Payoff from a Systematic Approach to People Management
Problem Solving
Mark Haug
Overview
We will cover the sources of uncertainty in our professional lives and why these sources create problems for us. Problems stem from uncertainty because nature deals us substantial uncertainty, but also because we aggravate uncertainty due to our own shortcomings, ignorance and lazy thought. After briefly covering natural uncertainty, we will examine how we manage our problems through reality checks and managing our own shortcomings. Upon completion of this program, you should have acquired meaningful tools for solving business problems and making better business decisions.
Course Topics
• Uncertainty and Problem Solving in Nature
o The uncertainty principle: recognizing and appreciate a few G-Rated facts of life.
o Decision errors: the tale of two inevitable tragedies—and they’re not death and taxes
o Importance of relationships: why we are not as smart as we think
• Uncertainty and Problem Solving in the Human Element
o Inability: rocket science and brain surgery are just excuses
o Cognitive Biases: We don’t know what we don’t know.
o Other Problems: Another name for bad habits is malpractice and how we can avoid malpractice.
• Managing Problems
o Messes: What is a mess and where do you start?
o Problems: This is your professional life.
o Puzzles: Why we cover the things we do in school.
• Applications in Business
o Finance
o Marketing
o Operations Management
o Quality Management and Continuous Improvement
o Incentive Planning
o Negotiations
Leading and Communicating
Mark Haug
Overview
In this session we cover the essentials of leadership and the role of communication in leadership and management. Although there are numerous tracts and advisors on the topic of leadership, a majority of leadership may be distilled into several traits. We will focus on these leadership traits and integrate several maxims of communication to provide a working model of leadership in an organization. Upon completion of this session, participants will have a renewed focus on their professional roles and scope of leadership in their organizations.
Course Topics
- Is professional integrity perception, reality or both?
- Discipline: Doing those things leaders ought to do, but things we would rather not do.
- Both the substance and the method of communication are essential to be an effective leader. What simple things establish leadership communications?
Wally Meyer
Overview
When you’ve captured your customers minds, their pocketbooks will follow. The specific approach to driving sales consistently is the marketing process, which is customer centric and embraces the primary influencers on customer purchasing behavior:
- demonstrable product or service benefits,
- perceived value of the offering,
- awareness and interest in the product or service offering and
- opportunity to purchase when the need is created or arises.
The application of this process to the specific challenges of the business will directly influence the likelihood of success in the marketplace. In this course, you will acquire the knowledge required to apply that marketing process successfully to your business challenge. Specifically, upon completion of this session you will:
- Approach the marketing process as a means of efficiently and effectively producing sales.
- Integrate marketing into the larger organization's goals and strategies.
- Identify the optimal customer target audience for your product or service by market segmentation.
- Effectively use price to impact the customer's purchase decision behavior, and use changes in pricing to stimulate customer demand in both the short and longer term.
- Position your product or service in the marketplace to maximize customer interest.
- Evaluate alternative means of reaching and persuading your customers to maximize sales and minimize costs.
- Use research to enable marketing decision making which is based on facts, not just conjecture, to significantly increase your decision batting average.
- Translate the learning in this session to a specific marketing action plan for your business.
Dennis Rosen
Overview
Customer satisfaction is insufficient to build your business. Satisfaction simply means customers consider your business an option. Even “loyal” customers are often only loyal until a better deal comes along. You want devoted customers who stick with your business and tell others about you. This requires going beyond simple satisfaction. In this session, we explore HOW to WOW your customers through analysis of physical and emotional needs that affect customer perception of your service. After breaking customer service down into its major components, we discuss how to determine actions that will have the greatest effect on perception of service. We review how to adapt to different customer personalities and moods and how to map the service process to enhance performance and customer response. These principles and actions also apply to working with internal customers, others in the firm who are dependent upon your performance.
Course Topics
• Stretching the concept of customer service. It requires more than you think.
• HOW to get beyond simple satisfaction to WOW your customers through needs analysis.
• Reality doesn’t matter. The importance of understanding customers’ perceptions and factors that cause perception conflict.
• The five major dimensions of customer service.
• How to adapt to personality and mood differences.
• Prioritizing service activities. Choosing where to start to have the greatest benefit.
• Dealing with waits. Five ways to shorten them for your customers.
• How to turn low-valued, low-cost activities into activities that are highly valued by your customers.
• Are you managing customer expectations? Here’s how.
• What to do when the customer isn’t right.
• Using a service blueprint to improve the service process.
Survival Accounting: Navigating Through Financial Statements
Paul Mason
Course Topics
• The Making of a Balance Sheet and Income Statement: We will actually build a balance sheet in the session using some common “transactions” and watching the statements almost come alive. From this simple, yet powerful exercise, we can catch a glimpse into the construction of current (and complex) financial statements and see first hand what each component really means.
• The Concept of Revenue (and Expenses): Agreeing on practical definitions of income and expense is perhaps the most controversial and elusive concept in accounting. The issue is also the substance that led to the fall of companies that are now household names such as Enron, WorldCom, and Andersen. We’ll explore why so many of the schemes were the result of very elementary accounting manipulations. Contrary to what the public may believe, we will see that these accounting mistreatments were actually not very complicated at all.
• Terms, Terms and More Terms: While accounting is serious business, it is also a game, one we actually started playing before we knew or understood all the rules. Because you need to understand the rules before you can play (and compete) we’ll discuss some of the common accounting assumptions and the related terms you may have heard but never really understood. This topic involves the accountants’ secret handshake – only you can learn it too!
• Which Numbers Do I Need? None of us would probably ever dream of actually running our business with the numbers reflected on the financial statements. These “public” numbers are just that – public. We’ll complete the session with a journey into the world of internal accounting, a place where the real secrets are held. We will discuss some of the most common accounting practices managers will encounter in business and address how, with a little coaching, you can sound like a pro!
Financial Statements: Tales Told in Dollars and Cents
Alee Phillips
Overview
Financial reports use an underlying code called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles – GAAP for short. Without understanding how GAAP numbers are determined, inferring their meaning is difficult. In this course we will explore recently issued financial statements of a publicly traded company. For each statement and account, we will consider the intent, measurement, information value and limitations of the numbers reported in the financial statements.
Course Topics
• Annual Reports
o What is the overall intent of Generally Accepted Accounting Principals?
o What are the limitations of financial accounting?
• Revenues
o When is a sale really a sale, and why doesn’t GAAP agree?
o How can you collect cash from a customer, and record a liability?
• Expenses
o Why are some expenses more important than others?
o What is a non-cash expense or, when is the cash really paid?
• Assets
o Which can be spent, and which are just expenses waiting to happen?
o How are they valued?
o How does buying and selling assets affect income?
• Liabilities
o What is an off-balance sheet liability?
o How are liabilities valued?
• Shareholders’ Equity
o Why can’t I spend it?
o How does stock based compensation work?
o Is Equity even a meaningful number?
• Cash Flows
o Why do cash flows differ from earnings, and why does it matter?
o Why doesn’t the cash flow statement make any sense, and how can I get something out of it anyway?
Using the Owners’ Money Wisely
Bill Beedles
Overview
“We treasure what we measure.” Some clichés hold great truth, and that is the case here. Unless we measure our financial performance, we have dreams rather than a business plan. The purpose of this session is to learn how to implement the two premier measures of financial returns that can be applied in public and private organizations. (1) Return on Equity (ROE) is strictly an accounting-based measure. (2) Residual Income combines data from accounting and the capital markets.
Course Topics At the end of this session, everyone should be able to:
• Isolate the parts of financial statements that are most important to the owners of the enterprise.
• Distinguish earnings from cash flow.
• Use those data to compute Return on Equity.
• Measure and interpret the three components that can be managed to increase ROE:
o Profit margin measures cost management.
o Turnover measures asset management.
o Equity ratio measures financing management.
• Apply the concepts by interpreting ROE and components in a cross-industry analysis.
• Identify the risks and returns of major asset classes articulating the effects of:
o Inflation on short-term U.S. Government obligations.
o Interest rate risk on long-term Governments.
o Default on corporate bonds.
o Variability on corporate shares.
o Liquidity on small companies.
• Estimate the required return of owners based on three components.
Returns available from risk free investments.
The return premium provided by an average risk investment.
The discount or premium provided by investments that are not average
Conservative.
Aggressive.
Counter-cyclical.
• Compute the Residual Income of an actual company.
o Distinguish Net Operating Profit After Tax (NOPAT) from accounting earnings.
o Estimate the Weighted Average Cost of Capital.
o Find the carrying cost of capital.
o Determine Residual Income.
• Discuss applications of the measures that have been used to solve real world problems.
Integrative Case and the Implementation Process
Tom Jindra
Overview
Learning is a perishable commodity. New knowledge is often lost unless is used in a practical way. The last session is designed to integrate the learning from previous sessions into a case study that enables us to practice our new skills in case study mode.
Course Topics
• Pulling it all together
• Building a Process for Implementation
• Execution Skills
• Developing a Culture of Performance
Course Outcomes: Upon completing the course, participants should be able to:
• Understand how to implement new learning in the workplace
• Build Methodologies for Implementation and Execution
• Enhance business potential through use of new skills and knowledge
• Link organizations to overall business strategy to maximize potential.
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