Technology & Operations Management - EMBA Programme
Core Course
Production and Operations Management
Businesses create value by supplying products or services to satisfy customer demand. But the inflexible nature of both supply and demand can lead to costly mismatches between them resulting in unsatisfied customers or wasted resources. In this course, you will acquire techniques to limit the occurrence and the impact of such mismatches and thus gain a competitive advantage for your organisation. The course has two parts. First, in Business Process Analysis and Improvement you will study tools and case studies that enable you to analyse, improve and design activities within the company. Second, in Supply Chain Management you will turn your attention to the external environment: sourcing raw materials and delivering goods to the customer.
Key Management Challenges
Collaborative Performance
Why is it so hard to make people collaborate productively in large organizations? Why do so many projects aimed at injecting collaborative processes in our organizations fail? Effective collaboration across distance and diversity is a real challenge for most global teams. The EagleRacing Simulation that we will start playing online and then complete and debrief in this session, will help us to focus on Collaboration Challenges and Dilemmas, explore behavioral, organizational and cultural factors determining the success or failure or collaboration initiatives – and also address emerging technologies and trends aimed at supporting diverse and distributed teams of managers and professionals. The simulation experience will be followed by an interactive debriefing session in which we will review latest insights and best practices related to the successful introduction of collaboration projects and systems, recent examples from companies such as Cisco, Alfa Romeo, Lego, Alstom or Google, and gain a number of actionable insights related to the successful introduction of collaboration processes and practices within organizations.
Corporate Governance
Corporate governance has been in the limelight over the last years, amplifying a trend that started a decade ago with major corporate scandals (Enron, Parmalat, Tyco ...). The financial crisis can be viewed as the result of governance failures of both financial companies, public markets, and regulatory agencies. The Euro crisis is largely a governance crisis. As a result, the subject of governance has as a result received a lot of attention from business leaders, managers, government officials, academics as well as the general public.
This KMC takes a broad organizational view of governance, examining start up as well not for-profit organizations (where proper governance is on average more difficult), and of course dealing with governance inside the corporation. It also takes a perhaps unusually personal view: are you being governed and governing yourself effectively? There has been plenty of academic and professional attention and discussion on the corporate governance front, as a result of the financial crisis. So we will be selective in the topics we chose to cover. Our main focus in the subject will be on governance as exercised by the board. We will discuss the board’s impact on the organization, the conditions for mutually satisfactory relations between board members, executive, shareholders and other stakeholders, and more generally for board effectiveness.
Identifying New Business Opportunities
Identifying New Business Opportunities is a fast paced, hands-on, experimental workshop where participants identify and refine disruptive business opportunities. As a group we will follow a step by step process, “Darwination” that will help us reach this end. This method is based on two key principles that guide the substance of the opportunities generated and the process of developing them:
- Substantively, we will focus on opportunities that disrupt an industry by reinventing the operating model of the industry. Typically, this entails revolutionizing the way in which the industry makes or sells the product. It does not necessarily require new developing new products or addressing any new markets, though the changes in the business landscape are often as revolutionary.
- From a process point of view, we will follow a systematic, risk limiting procedure to identify, eliminate and evolve business opportunities. Our method prescribes recipes to generate a large number of potentially disruptive operating models, a framework to evaluate them, leveraging the power of the crowd for fast feedback, a risk limiting sequence of steps to mutate and evolve these opportunities, and an innovative way to pilot new business opportunities.
Social Media Analytics
Management gurus have implicit incentives of coining new frameworks/buzz words every few years or so. Some of these frameworks radically shape the future of businesses, some become the flavor of the day but die out eventually, and some get relabelled/re-phrased/re-buzzed every now and then but never really go up or out. The latest buzz word that is getting a lot of attention is “big-data”.
What is big-data? The first-order answer is that it is tons of data! And to some extent this answer makes sense --- rapid growth in technology has enabled us in collecting, storing, and analyzing large amounts of data with modest investments in computing power. But this answer covers only the tip of the ice-berg. The important question is: other than the usual sources such as RFID, CRM, etc., is there a new source generating loads of data? And the obvious answer to this question is: the Web 2.0 revolution, which has created a platform for end users to communicate back with the internet, creating loads of user-generated-content (UGC) which has provided enterprises with partial access to the minds of their customers creating unprecedented opportunities.
Why do people share their likes/dislikes, where they had dinner, what movie they saw, their relationship status, sometimes their most intimate personal information, etc. is a mystery to many. How long will this phenomenon last? Perhaps with more awareness and concerns of privacy, end users may be less inclined to share their intimate personal information, but may still continue to share their opinions and less intrusive personal details. Maybe with time UGC will diminish significantly taking us back to the days of “regular-data”. But no business, small/ big, old/new, can ignore what big-data means for them today. This is a very new field --- most organizations today are “data rich” but “knowledge poor”. In this course we will try and take a first step towards understanding data generated via social media.
Science and Practice of Startups
Startups are a key source of wealth creation. While traditionally thought of as internet-based entrepreneurial ventures in the virtual world, today startups are disrupting the way of doing things by bringing established technology to many traditional real-world industries such as Automobile, food and beverage, transportation, hotels, etc. Armed with new business models, enabled by rapid advances in information and communication technologies and run with a unique Silicon Valley management style, startups today attract the best and the brightest from the world over and have caught the attention of policy makers and top management at established companies, each of whom wish to replicate their successes in their domains.
This KMC will expose participants to the startup culture and empower them with an understanding of processes to start their own entrepreneurial venture. Our activities will take place at Wharton’s West coast campus in San Francisco and in Silicon Valley.
