Executive MBA

Learn to assess the structure of the global business environment and how it affects industry structure, company strategy and performance. Learn what drives national competitiveness, productivity and growth.

Learn how to balance shareholders' expectations of financial performance and the nonfinancial demands of other stakeholders on ESG (environmental, social, and governance) Performance. Learn how top companies are developing innovative products, processes, and business models to meet both financial and nonfinancial objectives.

The dramatic changes in information technology and communication disrupt successful business models and lead to the evolution of new business models. Understand how social networks, Big Data, mobile technologies, cloud computing and services impact on businesses. Explore how the new technology trends impact the strategy and leadership of your business.

Develop a management methods’ approach to business and organization ethics. Master methods managers use individually and together in addressing ethics issues and in helping to build and maintain ethical organizations in various types of environments and realities. Master methods such as ethics reasoning, dialogue, presentation, governance, due process, negotiating, incentive, training, top-down and bottom-up compliance code and win-lose forcing methods.

This course concentrates on the economic foundations of management by developing tools to analyze key issues of the industry (Microeconomics) and general economic environment (Macroeconomics) of a company. The first part, Microeconomics, analyses consumer behavior, producer pricing and production decisions under different market structures. The second part, Macroeconomics, studies the operation of the entire economy, analyzing topics such as the determination of aggregate output, employment, inflation, interest rates, exchange rates and other macro variables.

Learn to develop powerful customer insights as a basis for creating, delivering and capturing customer value. Enhance your marketing decision-making skills in segmenting markets and creating winning marketing programs with an aim to build powerful brands and profitable customer relations.

You learn to crack down financial statement analysis:  what information to report, how to aggregate it and how to use it for decision making.  Learn also to critically assess financial statements with respect to assumptions and estimates firms use in reported figures.

Understand financial planning, the operation of financial and capital markets and long term investment planning.  Particular emphasis is given in major financial decisions with important strategic implications, such as investment appraisal, valuation of corporate securities, managing the company’s resources, raising capital and coping with uncertainty. The course also examines the way companies manage mergers and acquisitions and other forms of corporate restructuring. The relationships between the interests of corporate managers, shareholders and lenders as well as issues of corporate governance are an important part of the course content.

Production and Operations management can be defined broadly as the process steps that fulfil the production and delivery of “goods”, where “goods” include both material products and intangible services that offer some utility to the end consumer and the overall process subsumes all stages required to transform a product from a rough idea in a brainstorming meeting to the end customer offering. This course focuses on managerial decisions in production and operations and their interrelationships with the other functional areas of the firm. Major areas of study include the design of productive systems, strategic planning, and operations planning and control. Specific topics cover the areas of process and job design, facility planning, capacity planning, distribution planning, inventory management and production planning and control.

Learn how to address two key questions underlying any winning strategy: “where to play?” and “how to win?”  Master frameworks for assessing your firm’s resources and capabilities, where to deploy them, and how they can be used to master the key success factors in your industry. Understand what it takes to assemble skills, processes, knowledge, and organizational systems to build superior capabilities.

Understand how organizations are formed, structured and behave. Develop strategic insights on topics related to organizational culture, motivation, leadership, empowerment and participation, job satisfaction, managing teams, etc.

Master the tools for crafting, practicing and delivering impactful communications. Expand your arsenal across a variety of communication challenges such as encouraging employees in tough times, addressing tough questions from media, presenting your strategy to investors.

Management consists of a set of universal skills that are well understood and trainable. Leadership consists of how each one of us makes a unique difference to the challenges we face with people and projects. It is not about wasting our energy trying to make ourselves more effective by changing our characters. Instead, it is more effective to find new and better ways of ‘being ourselves’ through enhanced insight and skill.  The purpose of this course is twofold: (a) to assess and improve your readiness to function well as a leader by making your time at Alba Graduate Business School a self-directed journey of learning and development; the specific objectives are to develop an awareness of the knowledge and skills that underlie leadership effectiveness; to obtain individual-level feedback utilizing some of the best existing assessment instruments; to share feedback on your own and others’ skills; and to craft a personal leadership development action plan; (b) to help you acquire actionable knowledge about leadership styles, leading with power, and influence processes by exposing you to both classical perspectives on and contemporary trends in leadership theory and practice through a series of stimulating readings, discussions, exercises, and case studies. 

Explore Aristotle’s concept of Phronesis and its links with contemporary theories of human judgment and leadership. To lead other human beings, one needs a high degree of maturity, an intuitive grasp of the human condition and a developed sense of judgment, all of which are uniquely dealt with in Greek philosophy.

In the second part of this course, reassess your leadership skills and reflect on the career and leadership challenges that lie ahead. The course also focuses on career transitions, job crafting and work identity through the life-span.

Explore the art of effective negotiations: how to think strategically, what tactics to engage in, and what goals to aim at. You will practice negotiation skills, receive feedback on individual negotiation problems and improve your ability to analyze the motives of individuals and organizations in competitive and cooperative settings. In addition, you will explore organizations as political entities and how to use power and influence to promote organizational goals. You will learn to analyze power structures and develop methods for exercising influence to make things happen.

As managers realize that increasingly business issues are not manageable in a routine manner, so it grows the pursuit of novel means for interacting with complexity, ambiguity and serendipity. Arts can meet business in various ways beside their traditional relationship of entertainment or fundraising. Diving into the world of art holds many lessons for managers and provides ample opportunities to find relevant and creative insights into managing organizations. Through a unique blend of social research and art, this course creates an interactive and experiential learning atmosphere and ultimately helps participants deal with their own quest for creativity, communication, rotational leadership, impromptu planning and trust building.

Develop an understanding of what drives the effective management and utilization of human capital. Topics include employee motivation and reward strategies, performance assessment and feedback skills, along with talent management processes and challenges, competencies for driving forward the company vision and strategic objectives.

Explore the latest thinking on how to instill customer centricity in your organization. Learn to manage at the strategic level by selecting, acquiring, growing, retaining, and profiting from customers. Examine strategy, leadership, and the organization issues to build valuable customers and leverage customer relationships for profits over the long run.

Effective flow of goods and information through a procurement, production or distribution network are essential to superior customer service and productivity, both crucial drivers of business profitability. In this course, explore strategic supply chain issues such as capacity expansion or consolidation, make or buy decisions, production, procurement and logistics planning and customer service.

The objective of this course is to teach students execute business strategy by means of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), a strategic performance-management tool that aligns business activities, improves communication, and measures organization performance against strategic goals.  This course will help demystify the relationship among operation, strategy, dashboard, initiatives, HR values and competencies, mission, vision, and other business buzzwords.

By definition, Innovation is the ultimate value creation activity and, as such, it is the force behind all successful products, services, processes, and business models. If so, then why so many firms fail to innovate and instead fall into the trap of active inertia and eventual decline?  Why can’t they just innovate at will, even if competitors are already eating their lunch? Often confused with godsend ingenuity, innovation is actually a process, albeit not a straightforward one. In this course, explore what innovation is in a business context, how to make it happen, and how to build an organization that can foster it systematically.

The course examines the institutional and economic forces affecting the international financial markets and the firm:cross-border flows, inflation, interest rates, exchange rate regimes, the role of the central banks in exchange rate determination and the financial instruments available in international markets (forwards, options, futures and swaps).

Study the strategies and tactics in managing effectively opportunities and threats that are posed through the globalization of markets and industries. You are exposed to the various tradeoffs, the methodology and process in developing an international business strategy.

Expose yourself to the latest thinking and practice in the management of change through the aid of a powerful simulation game. Enhance your ability to cope effectively with corporate change in conditions that challenge traditional managerial practices.

This project-based seminar kicks off with exploring the Blue Ocean methodology to generate several value innovations to ignite growth in your business. Then you work to select and transform the most promising value innovation in the form of feasibility analysis. Finally, you work to develop a full fledging business model and assess its profit structure. In this integrative course, you draw together the EMBA skills and knowledge into your own business and receive coaching on your progress from several faculty members.

In the second year of the program, you will have the opportunity to travel abroad for a week-long Field Trip to gain insights about global economic and business trends; "insider" knowledge about the internal functioning of business firms in other countries; as well as direct, immediate opportunities to observe cross-cultural differences in leading organizations. During the Field Trip week, you will visit premier business organizations and meet with senior managers, while faculty will lead debriefing sessions to help you integrate the new experience with the knowledge gained through the Executive MBA courses.