Leadership is different from management. Managers get predictable things done predictably. Leaders inspire action and adaptability in an unpredictable world. This course delves into the concepts, tools and skills leaders need today. It combines theory and practice to examine such topics as strengthening emotional intelligence, motivating people to achieve strong results, managing conflict, leading change, aligning teams and eliciting support from colleagues and bosses. In addition, this course lays out Jack Welch’s time-tested techniques for high-performance team leadership.

Your career and ability to lead depend on effective communication. Communication is a learned skill that everyone can improve. This course will teach you techniques, often reserved for high potential executives, to advance your leadership presence, strategic communication, professional relationships, presentation performance, and workplace crisis management. You will sharpen your communication skills with targeted learning, practice, and coaching. Additionally, you will have the opportunity to optimize your online presence through strategic updates to your LinkedIn profile and peer feedback.

Marketing is the process of turning wants and needs into decisions and actions. It involves a range of activities designed to convey a persuasive message to a target audience. The course covers marketing plans, qualitative and quantitative research, consumer psychology, product positioning and strategy, pricing, packaging, brand equity, advertising, the marketing mix, customer value, and business-to-business global marketing.

At its simplest, managerial economics is about making decisions at the individual, firm, market and economy levels in the face of constraints, be they scarce resources, pricing pressures or global competition. In this course, you will explore powerful concepts like supply and demand, profit optimization, price sensitivity, demand estimation, productivity, cost analysis, market structures, marginal analysis, the government’s role in markets, forms of competition, risk analysis and pricing practices. In the end, you will be able to analyze and master competitive forces at both a quantitative and practical level.

Early on in your career, professional success depends on your innate talents, how you develop those talents and your initial career decisions. But once you become a manager, your ability to select, develop, promote and manage the right people becomes the most important determinant of success. In this course, students explore two general areas of people management: hiring and positioning the right players for organizational needs and managing people once the players are in place. Specific topics include sourcing and integrating new talent, managing strategic talent inventory, working with HR and organized labor, performance evaluations, and reward systems.

Financial accounting is the "language of business." Leaders must develop fluency in financial concepts, principles, and tools in order to understand and drive effective organizational decisions. In this course, you will learn to read, understand and analyze financial data as well as apply managerial accounting concepts such as costing, variance analysis, forecasting, and capital budgeting. Maximize the impact of your financial decisions by learning to speak with numbers.

Everyone in the organization is responsible for operational excellence. This course focuses on the pursuit of operational excellence as a competitive strength. Students gain the tools needed to identify opportunities for improving process effectiveness and efficiency. Topics include value stream mapping, process analysis, quality, customer-focused design, Six Sigma, and Lean systems.

Emphasizing the investment strategies of Warren Buffett, this course will help you develop the financial management skills necessary to analyze the competitive strengths of companies, and from that analysis, gain a better understanding of the qualities that investors in those companies seek. You will leverage these financial management skills to become a more strategic and tactical manager and improve your communication abilities when dealing with senior financial professionals.

In this course, students learn how to define your organization’s capabilities to implement and execute a winning strategy. Using Jack Welch’s approach to developing and evaluating a strategy, you will create an effective plan of action designed to achieve the higher-level goals of an organization. You will learn to drive strategic outcomes by consistently assessing decisions. You will identify criteria for uncovering risk, and develop plans for proactively addressing risks inherent to strategy.

From the rapid advance of technology to the steady march of globalization, powerful forces of change are shaping today’s business landscape. As leaders grapple with these forces, they also face enormous resistance to change. In this course, students learn a powerful framework for understanding and marshaling change. They also hear real stories and concrete strategies from the trenches—including Work-Out, Rapid Results, and Six Sigma—and learn when to use each tool.

Anyone can display an entrepreneurial streak, but not everyone can be an entrepreneur. In this course, you will learn what makes an entrepreneur tick and then walk through the stages of planning, financing and launching a new business. The course covers business plan development, market analysis, competitive positioning, business models, funding sources, company formation, intellectual property, sales, marketing, and hiring. The insights gained will give you a powerful leg up in launching new businesses and new ventures within existing businesses.

This course is where it all comes together. Students will synthesize and apply all they have learned during their JWMI MBA program. They will complete a Capstone Project in which they will prepare and present a well-researched strategic plan to take their organization to a more profitable and sustainable position of market leadership. Because business leaders, especially CEOs, cannot just act on hunches, the first half of this course will be focused on business analytics. This will include an overview of powerful quantitative strategies and techniques used to analyze business data in any organization and improve decision outcomes across all business functions. Students will use these same techniques to identify, collect and analyze the data needed to support their strategic plan.