Course Overview
This course will be quite different from typical courses. As a class we will explore emerging paradigms in management. Management is changing quite a bit these days. New ways of managing are emerging; some are driven by advances in information technology, while others are influenced by broader societal and demographic trends. In this course, we will use an ongoing research project into “the world’s best-performing companies” to explore emerging paradigms in three areas:
- New Business models: Doing well and doing good. Leading companies are proving that they can do well and make great contributions in the form of social and environmental performance. This is not about doing good deeds but about delivering products and services that make wider contributions.
- New ways of working: Flexible and Firm. The rigid, hierarchical, “9 to 5” workplace is also fast becoming outdated. Pioneering companies are showing glimpses of a more flexible future. They create workplaces where people experience meaning beyond money: work linked to social/environmental mission, strong culture that gives people a sense of belonging to a community, collaborative, rich with social media, balanced with life.
- New leadership paradigm: Command and Contribute. The rhetoric holds that heroic, command and control leadership is obsolete, replaced by distributed leadership. But, empowerment and purpose is being driven from the top, often by strong visionary leaders, who impose their vision of a better product and a better world in powerful and dominating ways. Evidence from top performers suggests a new leadership paradigm that embraces dualities, including heroic and distributed leadership styles.
These three elements work tightly together: business models for doing well and making great contributions infuse work with passion and meaning (people don’t want to go to work and give their best in the long-term when enriching shareholders is all there is too it); new workplaces take advantage of people’s passion and create superior work that deliver business performance; the new leadership model provides guidance to new ways of doing business and working (command-and-control leaders who only believe in shareholder return are not going to lead this new way of doing business).
The course will not use standard lectures: students and professor will together discuss and explore issues and company cases. The students will prepare discussion documents based on the study of leading-edge companies. The course is not a theory or academic research course but an applied management course.