Beyond Grey Pinstripes

     

Dalhousie University

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Dalhousie University
Dalhousie SBA
 6100 University Avenue, Rm 2087
Halifax, NS, B3H 3J5
Canada
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Demographic Information

Number of full-time MBA students (2011): 

38

Number of part-time MBA students (2011): 

2

Total duration of full-time MBA program: 

22 months

MBA faculty (Fall 2010): 

60

Females as percent of student body: 

39%


Description of MBA Program: 

The Faculty of Management at Dalhousie University is uniquely placed to support our MBA and other graduate students as they prepare for a world of increasing economic, social, ecological, political and technological complexity. Our four Schools of Management include Business Administration, Public Administration, Resource and Environmental Studies and Information Management. Together with our five Centres of Integrated Research and Learning and our Marine Affairs Program, we believe these units represent some of the best resources available in interdisciplinary thinking in management. All units of the Faculty of Management maintain a genuine commitment to students’ understanding of the social and ecological impacts of their future employment choices. As a result, our graduates are equipped to exercise this thinking whether they pursue careers in business, in the public sector, in civil society organizations or indeed all three.







Ours is not a Faculty or School which ‘retrofits’ social and ecological impact considerations into the MBA experience simply through electives or token introductory lectures in ethics or corporate social and environmental responsibility. All of our incoming full-time MBAs now join their colleagues in other graduate programs in a mandatory, for-credit foundation course entitled Management Without Borders, which deals explicitly with questions of global change and the impacts on society, organizations and individuals. MBAs work alongside future senior public servants and not-for-profit leaders over two terms to propose inter-disciplinary solutions to problems related to climate change, natural resource management and broader social questions concerned with human rights and ethical approaches to management.







The Faculty of Management also provides MBAs - as well as undergraduate business students and non-business students - with numerous lectures and extra-curricular opportunities which demonstrate the collective interests of the Faculty in broader issues in management. We have a large number of electives accessible to MBAs that reflect on social and environmental questions. We also have one of the longest established student groups concerned for these questions in the Corporate Environmental and Social Responsibility Society which is provided with dedicated office space in the Faculty.







Our philosophy represents a ‘values-based’ approach to management which unites the interests of all schools and programs in the Faculty.



How does the MBA program 'walk the talk' of social and environmental impact?: 

Vision for the Faculty and its graduates: Internationally acknowledged centre of ‘values based management’ whose graduates become private sector, public sector and civil society leaders who manage with integrity, focus on sustainability, and get things done.



Values based management is a positive approach to management (focused on what we cherish) as opposed to a negative approach to management (fixing problems). It focuses on maintaining or improving the status of those things we value.



The eight pillars of value based management of the Faculty of Management at Dalhousie are: Integrity, Diversity, Excellence, Innovation, Sustainability, Co-created learning, Relevance and Action orientation

Academic Department

Course Name: Managing People
Instructor: Barker, James Dr.

BUSI 5305 is a required course in foundational management principles. The course begins with students engaging competing philosophies of management and working to develop their own working philosophy that will guide them through their coursework, residency, and beyond. Parallel to this, students also learn how management is a responsibility to stakeholders and how the requirement for action requires both the individual manager and the organization to be responsible. The course then proceeds with the study of both foundational and contemporary management knowledge that is integrated with other core courses (e.g., Finance, Marketing, International Management, etc.). Augmenting this study is direct student engagement with responsible management issues facing today’s organizations. Students work with a content expert from another university to research and present current knowledge on such topics as high risk organizations, work-life balance, sustainability, responsible leadership, civil workplaces, design thinking, workplace violence, and social media. The course concludes with students practicing their knowledge by learning how to identify responsibility problems in organizations, craft appropriate interventions, and act to deal with the problem in ways that maintain and enhance the organization’s capability and capacity for being responsible.

Course Name: Managing the Family Enterprise
Instructor: Smith, Larry

Social issues are discussed in the context of where a family business fits within the community and the sense of community that family businesses tend to have. Ethical issues are discussed around the concept of stewardship

Course Name: Marketing Management
Instructor: Cunningham, Peggy Dr.

Marketing is the business function responsible for understanding the needs of consumers, suppliers and retailers and for creating value for these and other stakeholder groups. Furthermore, in this era of resource depletion and climate change, responsible and ethical marketing are increasingly being demanded. As such, marketing is more than a department within a firm - it is a function that must be undertaken on a company-wide basis. Marketing drives choices about what markets to serve and which needs to satisfy, about what partnerships and relationships to pursue, about product and service design, about prices that can be levied, and about the channels that can best be used for distribution and communication. The concepts presented in the course apply to businesses large and small as well as to not-for-profit organizations.

Course Name: Strategic Management of International Business Operations
Instructor: Sur, Sujit Dr.

Global corporations increasingly seek competitive advantage by tailoring their multinational operations to the legitimate economic, political and social aspirations of diverse national governments. This implies an in-depth understanding and nuanced balancing of the conflicting demands of the extended stakeholders across borders through intensive organization wide co-ordination and shared decision making. As the leading global corporations accept ethical, social and environmental management as the next source of competitive advantage, being well versed in the emerging domain of value based management is the managerial skill set in demand. This course critically examines the generic and functional strategies open to multinational enterprises and based on the learning from academic and practitioner journal articles, seeks to test the applicability of these concepts in a simulation as well as current industry and business case studies. There is a special emphasis on the base of the pyramid approach, social innovation, and sustainable development as these are increasing considered to be not only fundamental corporate responsibilities, but also as the next frontier in international business development.

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