Core courses

Analyse the two key goals of the financial function: to invest wisely and to make decisions about how best to finance a company. Examine investment decisions within companies and financial market decisions, such as capital structure.

Recognise and manage ethical and social responsibility issues as they arise in business and formulate standards of integrity and professionalism. Topics include examination of ethical dimensions within business conduct, professional standards and responsibilities.

Develop the managerial tools to make informed decisions when relying on data. With an emphasis on concepts and reasoning, rather than technical detail, you learn to understand and quantify uncertainty in a managerial context.

Learn how to evaluate the impact of risk on your business, make decisions in the face of uncertainty and allocate scarce resources to optimise business performance.

Explore how an individual's personality, motivation and managerial style affect their working relationships, and hence their effectiveness within an organisation. Examine macro-organisational issues and diagnostic frameworks for organisational analysis. You are encouraged to apply this analysis and learning to your own work context.

Examine the unique challenges involved in managing entrepreneurial ventures, whether they are start-ups, small, early-stage entrepreneurial firms or units within larger, well-established companies. Working in teams, you assess the attractiveness of a real entrepreneurial opportunity and prepare a feasibility study.

Understand how managers communicate company results to investors, creditors and analysts. You learn to appreciate the rationale for various accounting methods, develop a critical view of managers' accounting choices, learn to compute and interpret basic financial ratios, and explore why international differences in reporting exist.

Examine basic accounting techniques, accounting for delegated decision making and the impact of strategic and organisational change on the use and usefulness of accounting information.

Develop your interpersonal skills and enhance your ability to persuade and drive change through the implementation of core management skills. Working in groups, you learn to make the very best of your leadership potential.

Explore the logic and language of microeconomics, focusing on prices, markets, incentives and optimal decision making and how organisations behave under different market structures. This is a course in applied microeconomics, with a primary focus on the needs of managers.

Examine in depth the marketing mix and tools to develop and deliver customer value, such as branding and brand management, targeting and positioning, pricing strategies and segmentation. Investigate marketing strategies for your organisation to respond to and stay ahead of market and competitor changes.

Distinguish and develop the appropriate methods for managing operations in changing business environments by focusing on productivity and customer service as the basis for creating business profitability.

Develop your ability to think strategically, evaluate strategic options, and anticipate and manage strategic change. Use leading-edge tools and techniques, including team-based simulations and system dynamics models.

Understand the role management plays in promoting economic and social progress. By highlighting the professional challenges and responsibilities you will face, this course delivers a framework to draw on your own managerial experience.

Study the deep forces that determine the corporate environment and the backdrop against which firms must operate. Consider what makes countries rich and how added value is created, how technology impacts on the economy, and the role of trade in influencing national wealth, corporate performance and industrial structure.