Decision Sciences – EMBA Programme
Core Course
Uncertainty, Data and Judgment
The goal of this course is to provide a solid foundation in probability and statistics for subsequent courses at INSEAD and for a management career beyond. After all, most management decisions are made under conditions of uncertainty. So you will need a framework for thinking about problems involving uncertainty and, building on this framework, some tools for interpreting data. These are precisely the tools and frameworks that this course provides. While some technical analysis is essential, the content is presented from the perspective of a future manager, rather than from the viewpoint of a technician. As well as learning from lectures, exercises and case studies, you will use computer software to make calculations and analyse data.
Elective Courses
Big Data Analytics for Businesses
This class is a follow up hands-on “quant” class to your required core class Uncertainty, Data and Judgment (UDJ). UDJ ended with regression for forecasting and decision making. In this course we will continue with more tools for data analytics and decision support that are widely used in business. We will also discuss the challenges of introducing new Information Technologies in organizations as well as managerial issues regarding IT Management broadly speaking.
It is now well-accepted that one of the frontiers in business for innovation and competitive advantage is the use of analytics and tools to support and improve operational and strategic decisions. Traditionally data rich companies, such as retail companies like Wal-Mart, online companies like Amazon and Google, financial institutions like Capital One, and many others, have been among the early leaders in this wave, showing the many benefits of these technologies for business. Today it is increasingly an exception for companies not to use such tools. These are technologies and tools that transform companies and industries potentially much like IT and data analytics have transformed (for better or worse) the financial sector over the past decades.
This course will show you how to analyse a surprisingly wide array of business planning and decision problems using data analytics tools. Powerful and easy to use tools have been developed to assist in these processes. The course will have a data and tools hands on flavour, in addition to discussions.
Management Decision Making
This course focuses on the behavioral aspect of judgment and decision making. How do people make decisions? What are the common pitfalls of managerial decisions? Research shows that people rely on a small number of heuristics in making decisions. These heuristics are extremely useful: they are fast, easy and they get us close to the right answer most of the time. However, they can also lead to serious mistakes. While intuition often serves us well, there are many decision traps that we tend to fall into on a repeated basis. The goal of this course is to help participants learn to make better decisions by improving their understanding of the workings of the mind. In short, the course is about the psychology of decision making.
Negotiations
Negotiations occur daily in business interactions, be it with corporate clients, distributors, business partners, suppliers, sub-contractors, colleagues, bosses, trade unions, etc. Negotiations may not even occur at the bargaining table: sometimes deals are unlocked while informally chatting with a business partner during dinner or at the airport. This course is designed to help participants become more successful negotiators by offering a pragmatic, step-by-step approach to help improve the behavioral and analytical skills that are essential to a negotiator’s success. Participants will learn both (1) how to remain firm in a negotiation and (2) how to maintain a constructive negotiating climate. The goal of this course is to develop a more comfortable interpersonal style in dealing with both the issues and the people.
Key Management Challenges
Ethics
I cannot tell you anything you don’t already know about what is right or wrong – and won’t pretend otherwise. What I can do, I believe, is help you better understand some aspects of the history of ethical thinking that you might find interesting. In my view, there are some fundamental things that well educated people should know about; we will focus on some important ones that relate to ethics. I think you will find this history interesting, and suspect that you may be able to use this knowledge in the future when you are required to discuss ethical issues.
We will also be very practical in this course. One of my motivating assumptions is that there’s a lot of ethical experience and wisdom amongst us all (in the class), and that it’s valuable to bring this wisdom to the surface and share it. We will do this through a series of experiential exercises that include acting, storytelling, and simply talking with one another. If we can leave our dogma at the door, I think that we can learn a lot about ethics through these activities. And hopefully we will learn in a way that will allow us to remember what we’ve learned. (Stories help with that, we’ll see.)
