Course Information

Meeting Time: Friday 9am-12pm (Exceptions: Saturday, February 2 and 9, and May 4)
Location: 202 South Hall
Professor: Morten T. Hansen (hansen@ischool.berkeley.edu)
Office Hours: By appointment
Teaching Assistant: Carinne Johnson (cjohnson@ischool.berkeley.edu)

Note from Professor Hansen
Course Overview
Pedagogical Approach
Course Material
About the Instructor

Note from Professor Hansen

For 2012 I am on leave from the I School to work at Apple. I am fitting this course into a full-time work load at Apple. For this reason two sessions will be conducted on Saturdays instead of Fridays:

  • Saturday, February 2, 10am-1pm (instead of February 1)
  • Saturday, February 9, 10am-1pm (instead of February 8)

Also, for the same reason, my office hours will not be regular. You can always reach me by e-mail or by appointment.

Course Overview

This course is offered by the School of Information. It focuses on managing people and processes in highly information and knowledge-intensive organizations, such as firms in the high-tech, biotech, pharmaceutical, media, consulting, and investment banking industries. In these settings, human and intellectual capitals are critical to success, and the management of these resources (or lack thereof) often makes the difference between success and failure. In this course, we will take a process lens and a general management approach (vs. a functional specialist one): we will focus on people-oriented processes that a manager can put in place to improve performance. That is, this course will not focus on technical IT topics or business strategy issues void of people
considerations. Instead, it focuses on how managers can organize a sequence of activities that guide how people carry out work.

While other courses concentrate on one activity (e.g., a course on innovation), this course will cover three important processes that are salient in information-intensive settings:

  • Managing innovation
  • Managing collaboration
  • Managing team decision making

The idea is that a manager needs to adopt and execute these three processes in order to create a high-performance work unit. The primary emphasis will be on these processes within established companies (vs. a startup or between companies).

This course is useful for students who want to work in high-tech companies, consulting,
healthcare, investment banking, and other knowledge-intensive companies and institutions. You will soon be asked to manage teams and then larger groups in those settings, and this course will equip you with skills to do that. The course is also useful for PhD students who wish to understand these three processes and organization theory more broadly.

Pedagogical Approach

The course will rely on a mix of pedagogy, with an emphasis on cases. Class attendance and weekly preparation and participation is critical to make this class fun, interesting and useful. Each session will typically have a case on a large company and one or two readings. We will spend the first part of each class discussing the case and then take a step back and discuss the main concepts. Because we will discuss a case in every class, you will need to study the case beforehand for each class and be well prepared to discuss it in class. This is an absolute requirement for taking the course. You will be randomly called upon to offer comments on the case under discussion.

Course Material

There is no reader for this course. Most of the course material will be available on the course webpage.

About the Instructor

I am a professor at the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Previously I was a professor at Harvard Business School where I taught in the MBA program. I have also been a professor of entrepreneurship at INSEAD, a leading business school in Europe, where I led the executive education program for SAP (the software company) and where I taught in the MBA and executive education programs. My research has been on knowledge sharing, networks and collaboration in companies. I have also spent a number of years working as a consultant and senior manager in the London, Stockholm and San Francisco offices of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). I received my PhD in business administration from the Stanford Business School.