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This course is about dialogue – a crucial tool needed to build and sustain high levels of engagement, tap into the collective wisdom of an organization or any network of relationships, enhance organizational learning and achieve sustained performance of an enterprise over time.  Dialogue is strongly linked to systems thinking and organizational learning. It is about what an organization can achieve by thinking/communicating together with a collective agenda rather than utilizing top-down communication and individual agendas. Topics include: shared meaning and its influence on performance; examining our assumptions; transformation; biology of cognition; systems thinking; leadership; social collaboration; cross cultural challenges and issues; cross organizational challenges and issues; social action research; and integrating dialogue into core organizational processes.  Students learn to participate in and lead critical dialogue conversations to utilize the collective wisdom of the organization and its stakeholders and thus expand social well-being within the organization and across its stakeholder network. Within systems thinking, the expansion of social well-being expands economic well being, which in turn expands environmental well being.

In Business Analytics we emphasize the role of analysis in leading the organization and the uses as well as limitations of analytical results especially in light of social and organizational context. Generation of insight: Interpret analytical results in terms of a larger context, identify and prioritize key issues, and cogently articulate business insights. Managerial communication: Use models and analytical results to make compelling and actionable business recommendations to non-technical audiences, taking into consideration a broad range of managerial issues.

This course is intended to provide students with a comprehensive conceptual and applied understanding of the sustainability challenges and opportunities facing corporations on a global scale with primary emphasis on environmental sustainability. Students will be exposed to a variety of pressing sustainability issues and to new techniques and approaches for successfully dealing with them. This will occur through readings, case studies, lecture-discussions, and presentations by guest faculty members, corporate executives and sustainability consultants. Because business cannot succeed in a world that fails, this course will examine some of the major factors that are contributing to the adoption of sustainability strategies as a means of gaining future competitive advantage by a number of global industry leaders. These include the inability of the public sector to meet the growing demands of a global society, the emergence of new legislation and market mechanisms that are attaching a price to environmental and social impacts, and society’s rising expectations of business in terms of health, safety, human rights, and the environment. The role of corporations in society has changed from one of creating shareholder value to one where performance is measured in terms of social, environmental and economic value added. Topics to be covered in the course include sustainability concepts and frameworks, sustainable design of products and facilities, global warming and the carbon dilemma, renewable energy, sustainable finance, and strategic sustainability implementation.

This course examines the ethical aspects of individual and corporate decision making in business and provides resources for making ethical decisions within the context of managerial practice.

This course covers business ethics and corporate social responsibility in the global contexts of employment, marketing, product liability, the environment and other areas. Students compare ethical theories, including utilitarianism, Kantian, Rawlsian, stockholder, stakeholder and social contract and apply some or all of these theories to actual and hypothetical case studies. The doctrine of corporate social responsibility is defined and explored and diverging views of corporate social responsibility are discussed. Examples of how corporate social responsibility can increase a company's goodwill and net income are analyzed.

Amongst other topics, the Business Fundamentals course deals with systems thinking, and value-based management. Students are exposed to an integrated worldview, in which governance is an important power of a systemic understanding of the company and society/industry at large. Sustainable development and growth of the system (company/industry/society) is constantly addressed. In addition to governance, the ethos of the system is addressed. In this perspective, the worldview, values, culture, and attitudes, as well as leadership philosophy are identified as important drivers of value in the system.

Turning the world’s poor into active actors in global markets requires wide-ranging innovation in business leadership and management practice, including development of new business models. Moreover, building business opportunity alongside social transformation requires managers to display uncommon empathy and humility. This course promotes individual reflection on the role that managers can play in making such opportunity happen. This course entails exploring the following questions: Why do companies address low income group markets? What strategies are required to successfully undertake BOP market initiatives? How can the social and economic impact of these engagements be measured? The course tackles these issues by drawing on the experience of leading companies and other organizations engaged in business ventures with BOP markets. Course materials examine the viability of such initiatives and show how they impact poor communities.