Electives

Lecturer: Shivakumar Lakshmanan

Financial reports are the primary means by which managers communicate company results to investors, creditors and analysts. These parties use the reports to judge company performance, to assess creditworthiness, to predict future financial performance, and to analyse possible acquisitions and take-overs. Users of financial statements must be able to meaningfully interpret financial reports, construct measures of financial performance and analyse the reporting choices made by companies. Also, since company managers choose accounting techniques when making their reports, users must learn to undo the effects of these accounting choices. The purpose of this course is to give the foundation for such analysis.

Lecturers: Eli Talmor and Florin Vasvari

This course covers the concepts, techniques, instruments and institutions involved in private equity investment. The course addresses the various segments of private equity, including new venture finance, corporate venture capital and buyouts. Particular attention will be given to the technology sector and to turnarounds, segments which comprise the majority of private equity investing.

The course is structured along five themes: venture capital contracts, valuation, deal processing and dynamics, structure of the private equity market; and harvesting. These themes cover the different stages of investment in a venture firm: from early rounds to the exit stage where the value of the investment is realised. The course contrasts buyout and venture transactions. It also covers the structure, strategy and performance of the private equity firm.

Lecturer: Richard Portes

The European Union has long been the world's leading case of economic integration. Since 1990, it has been progressing towards an integrated financial area, culminating in monetary union (EMU). How does the European Central Bank differ from the Fed? Will the euro compete with the dollar as an international currency? Can European capital markets challenge the US for international portfolio managers and non-European issuers? Will Europe soon have serious venture capital and junk bond sectors? Will the European banking sector experience a deep wave of cross-border restructurings? Will European securities exchanges merge - or disappear? These and other key issues are explored.

Lecturers: Andrew Scott and Richard Portes

The purpose of this course is to deepen your understanding of the way the global economy is evolving by considering current topical issues. The aim is to give you further experience in economic analysis as well as to provide you with the knowledge of what the global economic environment is likely to be in the five years or so after graduating. The course will provide an understanding of the likely behaviour of financial markets and the general business background as well as the issues facing governments in their policy choices. It will be of interest to those seeking a career in the financial professions, international consulting or those with a general interest in global issues.

Lecturers: Francesca Cornelli, Brandon Julio and David Yermack

The main aim of this course is to enable students to apply the theoretical concepts, covered in the basic finance courses, to problems in the area of corporate finance with all the complexities that the real world entails. Through cases and discussion of topical issues, the course provides the opportunity to analyse practical financial situations and problems. Cases will be used to motivate the discussion of the gap between rigorous finance theory and its application to practical problems in corporate finance, and the thought-process required when faced with this gap.

Lecturers: Vito Gala and Francisco Gomes

Capital Markets and Financing (CMF) complements the Corporate Finance and Valuation (CFV) course, and forms the second part of a two-course sequence covering corporate finance. While the focus of CFV was on valuing projects and companies, CMF switches the emphasis to financing decisions. While not a core course as such, CMF covers key areas of finance with which all MBAs, EMBAs and Sloan Masters programme participants should be familiar. For this reason the course is a pre-requisite for virtually all finance electives.

The aim of the course is to provide a broad conceptual and practical platform for analysing issues in corporate finance. CMF examines the financing activities of firms, how firms raise capital and the implications of various financial decisions. In particular we will examine equity issues, dividend policy, corporate debt, and hybrid forms of financing such as convertibles and warrants.

CMF provides an introduction to a key topic in finance, namely options. Options are pervasive in corporate strategy and finance. We will look at techniques for pricing options, which then will be applied to warrants and convertible bonds, as well as the insurance provided by underwriters in rights issues. We will also look at the real options approach to valuation of projects. Finally, we discuss how options and other derivatives such as forwards can be used in the context of hedging financial risks.

Lecturer: TBC

The objective of this course is to study the most important theoretical concepts in the field of investment management, to examine whether these theories are supported by empirical evidence, and to identify the practical implications for investment professionals. The course will emphasise topics where research provides an important message for professional management of the investment function. This should be of particular relevance to those working in investment, or seeking to open up career opportunities in asset management. It will also appeal to anyone who is likely to have contact with investors, fund managers, investment consultants or investment organisations

Lecturer: Raman Uppal

The aim of this elective is to provide an integrated view of international financial markets and the management of multinational firms. The focus will be on the markets for spot exchange, currency forwards, options, swaps, international bonds, and international equities. For each of these markets, students will study the valuation of instruments traded in these markets and, through cases, the application of these instruments to the following corporate decisions: (i) managing exposure to exchange rates and country risk, (ii) financing in international capital markets, and (iii) international capital budgeting in the presence of multiple currencies, international tax regulations, and sovereign risk.

Lecturers: Julian Franks and Paolo Volpin

This elective examines several forms of corporate reorganisations, including mergers and acquisitions, reorganisation through workouts and bankruptcy, divisional spin-offs and divestitures, and leveraged buyouts. Students will examine the process of managing reorganisation, the role of the investment bank and other specialists, regulation, and cross-country comparisons.

The course will have a strong conceptual approach, with an emphasis on why mergers and other reorganisations take place, what is their role in the economy, and how do they perform from the viewpoint of shareholders and other parties. There will be a strong institutional flavour that will be communicated through papers of a more applied nature. Real case studies and outside speakers will provide the applications of the course.

Lecturer: Lars Lochstoer

Derivative instruments such as futures, swaps and options are now an indispensable part of the toolkit of all financial practitioners, from investment managers to corporate financiers. Like all powerful tools, though, they are as easy to misuse as to use. The purpose of this course is to provide students with the necessary skills to enable them to be an informed user of derivatives. Students will acquire a robust conceptual knowledge of the fundamental issues that determine the valuation and behaviour of these instruments, thorough grounding in both the real-world details of the products, and in the models used to analyse them. As mathematical models are central to both the existence and functioning of modern derivatives markets, the course is highly quantitative.

Lecturer: Sreeni Kamma

Over the last two decades, project finance - a new contracting technology for allocating the risks and rewards of large-scale projects - has become a highly visible force in the field of finance. Worldwide private sector investment in project finance deals now exceeds $100 billion p.a., and is expected to continue to grow. More recently, governments around the world have begun to switch to financing capital investment off balance-sheet instead of issuing government securities. An important part of this trend is PPP (Public Private Partnerships) and PFI (the UK government's Private Finance Initiative), pioneered in the UK and becoming widespread around the globe.

This course focuses on the principles of corporate finance and the lens of market imperfections to examine how project finance can add value. Topics covered include why project financing is being increasingly relied on to fund investments; the advantages over traditional corporate finance; why some structures fail where others succeed; valuation challenges posed by such structures; if projects encounter financial distress, how should they optimally be restructured.

Lecturer: Joao Cocco

This course provides the concepts and tools necessary for understanding real estate markets and for managing real estate assets, with a focus on value creation. Most of the course will focus on commercial real estate. Topics covered include valuation and investment analysis, financing, economic, legal, political and taxation issues and recent trends and challenges.

Lecturer: Elroy Dimson

This course provides a tour of the world of investment management, where students will learn about asset management in practice and be better prepared for a career in investment. Topics raised will include what jobs do asset managers and their advisers do and what are the challenges as new ideas are adapted to meet the needs of customers and clients. Students will study the real jobs of analysts, quantitative specialists, strategists, fund managers, distributors, consultants, real-estate and hedge-fund professionals and investment advisors.

Lecturer: Derek Bunn

This elective gives London Business School students the opportunity to work with industry participants taking the Competitive Electricity Markets short course, which has been successfully offered by the Energy Markets Group at London Business School for the past nine years. Previous students interested in this sector have found mixing with the industry specialists in this course to be particularly rewarding.

The course focuses mainly upon electricity, but is also relevant to students wishing to be familiar with related issues affecting the oil and gas industry. The objective is to give students an introduction to the basics of power system economics, a review of the structural and strategic changes affecting the industry, investment issues and technology choice, a basic understanding of how the competitive markets for electricity, both wholesale and retail, work and how to model their price and implications.

Lecturers: Chris Voss and PY Gerbeau

This course focuses on the business of sport and entertainment. The aim is to develop understanding and skills in the strategic, operational and marketing management of these two related sectors. It is designed to foster strategic and operational thinking in a rapidly professionalising area and one key to future economic growth.

Lecturer: Bert De Reyck

Projects are the wave of the future in global business. Increasingly complex products, processes and services, vastly shortened time-to-market windows and the need for cross-functioning expertise make project management an important and powerful tool in the hands of organisations that understand its use. The increase in project-based organisations in areas such as consulting, information technology, product development, advertising, education, health care, infrastructure and engineering, places project management in the centre of attention. Project management provides organisations with a powerful tool that improves its ability to plan activities, controls the ways in which it utilises resources, and minimises risks.

With the globalisation of our enterprises and the penetration of technology into virtually every business activity, projects have become more complex and demanding regarding time, cost and performance. Professionals managing these projects must understand the concepts, methods, techniques and tools that support modern project management. Therefore, in this elective, frameworks, methods, techniques and tools will be presented for coping with the three principal dimensions of project management: time, cost and quality. In computer workshops, the participants will get hands-on experience with state-of-the-art software tools for project management (time planning, resource allocation, and risk analysis), although emphasis is also placed on organisational and strategic issues.

Lecturer: Nirmalya Kumar

The goal of this course is to help students develop a comprehensive understanding of how marketing strategies can be developed and executed in dynamic and competitive global marketing environments. It is an integrative course that brings together the marketing activities of creating, capturing, and sustaining customer value in a variety of marketing contexts. Students will be exposed to the most recent theories and methods, analytical techniques, and current best practices for developing marketing strategies. The course is run as a block week and focuses on the interaction between the process of formulating, implementing, and controlling marketing strategies and the various stages of the product life cycle.

Lecturer: Simona Botti

Brand management is a vital topic for any MBA, and this elective offers students the chance to take one of the most applied and advanced courses on brand management available anywhere in the world. Rather than focus on academic theory, the course takes an extremely managerial viewpoint. Explored are all dimensions of brand management, from defining brands, brand building strategies, brand architecture and extension issues, brand repositioning; these points will have particular focus to special topic areas: luxury brands and retail brands. The course focus ranges from small start-up brands, consumer brands, service brands and B2B brands. The course will be run as an intensive block week course, and will include a variety of teaching methods, including guest speakers who are senior branding experts currently engaged in branding issues.

Lecturer: Anja Lambrecht

In today's global and competitive environment, how to go to market is an essential choice for most managers: when product or service excellence is given, the choice of the optimal go-to-market approach critically determines a company's success. This is true for B2C markets, B2B markets as well as services. A well designed and executed go-to-market strategy will be a major source of differentiation, a badly designed and managed go-to-market strategy will almost certainly lead to failure.

Yet, go-to-market decisions are extremely complex, require an in-depth understanding of your customers' needs and place a premium on getting it right the first time: they are likely to create conflicts of interest and are extremely hard to change. In this course you will learn the fundamentals on how to successfully design, manage and evaluate a company's channel and sales force strategy and tactics. Go-to-market decisions both affect and can only be taken in light of the overall marketing strategy, therefore we discuss the interaction of channel and sales force decisions with other marketing variables, such as branding, pricing, product characteristics or the product lifecycle.

Lecturer: Rajesh Chandy

This decision focused and process orientated course covers topics such as; identifying, initiating and responding to breakthroughs, disruptors and radical innovations; organising for innovation; internalising external sources of innovation; entering new markets and ensuring product take-off. It provides concepts, cognition and context to making strategic decisions on innovation.

Lecturer: Marco Bertini

To improve performance, firms spend considerable resources trying to increase sales volume (through branding campaigns, sales force training and incentives, etc.) or decrease costs (through process re-engineering, R&D investments, etc.), but very little on trying to optimize price. This widespread tendency is in many ways perplexing because price affects the bottom line of an income statement like no other variable in the profit equation. Successful pricing decisions involve an understanding of both supply side factors (e.g. costs) and demand side factors (e.g. willingness to pay). A broad, pragmatic view of pricing entails knowledge of economic, behavioural, and strategic considerations.

This course aims to equip students with the fundamental tools and conceptual frameworks needed for making profitable pricing decisions across diverse industries. Taking the perspective of the marketing manager, we will explore both the strategic and tactical dimensions that underlie the process of price management. To accomplish this objective, the course introduces useful theories and practical approaches for solving pricing problems. While the emphasis is obviously on one aspect of the marketing mix, it is important to keep in mind that pricing is not independent of other marketing decisions. An important challenge in this course, therefore, is to consider pricing decisions in the context of other marketing mix activities as well as marketing strategy. Ultimately, the effectiveness of pricing policy is evaluated vis-à-vis the broader objectives set by management.

Lecturer: Nigel Nicholson

Family firms make up around 70% for businesses worldwide and account for a substantial proportion of GDP. Many of the world's leading corporations originated as family firms and retain cultural distinctiveness as a result. Yet they are neglected in management literature. However, as the financial crisis illustrated, with their long time scales, adaptive cultures and vision-led leadership many are much better fitted to prosper in turbulent times than many PLCs. This highly practical course aims to give students a complete guide to family firms. This course analyses the factors that make family firms unique, the special challenges they face, and the strategies that can be deployed to help them. The course is designed for family business owners, managers, advisors or anyone who has an interest in this fascinating sector.

Lecturer: Margaret Ormiston

The purpose of this course is to help students understand the general principles and processes of effective leadership so that you can lead in a wide variety of situations. The course covers a broad variety of leadership situations and particular attention will be paid not only to leader attributes but to the "leadership" that arises from understanding group processes and the ways in which team members influence one another. Topics covered include understanding more about the nature of leadership, learning what separates successful business executives from their less successful counterparts and how to develop confidence as a leader. Students who take full advantage of this course will be prepared to lead teams effectively, and the course is relevant for any student pursuing a managerial career.

Lecturer: Richard Jolly

As an increasingly fundamental part of business, change management is a crucial skill for managers, whether the company is large or small, local or transnational. Coming up with the right strategy is only a small part of organisational success - the hardest challenge is in getting key stakeholders and people throughout the organisation not just to implement the strategy, but to own it. This course will build the student's understanding of, and practical capability to implement, the many facets of change management and how to plan for and cope with change and its implications.

Lecturers: Gillian Ku, Madan Pillutla and Ena Inesi

The course is designed to be relevant to the broad spectrum of negotiation problems that are faced by the manager and professional. Students will gain a broad understanding of the central concepts in negotiation, as well as learn and develop strategies for analysing and preparing for negotiations. Students will have the opportunity to practice negotiation skills, receive feedback on individual negotiation problems and improve their ability to analyse the behaviour and motives of individuals, groups, and organisations in competitive situations. The course is suitable for anyone who communicates in their daily interactions with other people, and will be useful to those with interests in brand management, real estate, consulting, entrepreneurship or mergers and acquisitions.

Lecturer: Richard Jolly

Power has been called the "organisation's last dirty secret," and power remains a topic that makes some people uncomfortable. But power is a reality in much of organisational and social life. Leadership involves building and using influence. Strategy implementation and organisational change both require mastery of influence skills. The overall aim of this course is to help students see the world differently - to change what they notice and think about and how they apprehend the world around them. It will also equip students to recognise and know how to cope with the difficult situations that may be encountered. Topics covered include: 'The paths to power: Finding your way and preparing yourself', 'Building your path to power: Creating a domain' and 'Falling off the path: What's different when you have power and how is power lost'.

Lecturer: Julian Birkinshaw

Today, more than ever, a critical imperative for companies is strategic agility- the capacity to adapt quickly in the face of ever changing market conditions. Many traditional views of strategy are static; they assume a foreseeable future, and they build on the premise that competitors and customers will act in predictable ways. This course does not make such assumptions. Instead, it builds on the expectation that the future is uncertain, fast-changing and unknowable. How do we craft strategy in these circumstances? How should we structure ourselves to be more agile? How can we engage and motivate employees across our organisation to help us identify and act on opportunities? These are all important questions that will be addressed during the course.

Lecturer: Phanish Puranam

Most large companies, and many quite small ones, are not single businesses but 'groups', comprising a portfolio of more or less separate business units and one or more levels of 'corporate' management. Such portfolios may be apparently 'diverse', spanning several different industries, or more 'focused', with a number of directly parallel business units, or businesses in closely related industry sectors. Whatever the composition of the portfolio, there remains a question as to why it should exist at all, and to what extent it is worth more as a whole than the combined value of its constituent parts. The prime aims of this course are to clarify the nature of corporate, as opposed to business strategy, and to help students assess corporate strategies and develop superior ones. The course is particularly useful for those intending to become strategy consultants or investment bankers as well as those who plan to work in, and eventually lead, multi-business groups.

Lecturer: John Mullins

Entrepreneurship Summer School is an experientially based, elective course in which the participants, working solo or in pairs, will conduct mentored due diligence on an entrepreneurial opportunity they have identified. It enables participants to learn the entrepreneurial way of life, gain self-awareness of their entrepreneurial visions, identify what is necessary to pursue them and develop and apply the skills required to contribute to successful entrepreneurial practice and build a network of key contacts.
Please visit the Entrepreneurship Summer School website for more information.

Lecturers: John Mullins, Antony Ross, Martyn Williams

This course is designed to introduce you to the issues and practices of financing entrepreneurial businesses (start-ups, emerging growth companies, management buy-outs and buy-ins, etc.) The course covers matters regarding raising finance, pricing & structuring financings, and exiting from the points of view of the entrepreneur and of the investor.

The course is designed for individuals who want to start, buy or run their own businesses, either now or in the future; those who want to work in the venture capital industry; those who expect to provide financial or consulting services to entrepreneurial companies; and those who want to learn about personal investing in privately-held companies.

Lecturer: Louise Mors

In this course, you will learn to understand both the economic underpinnings and the managerial implications of global strategy. Our objective is to provide you with the diagnostic skills to create and implement global strategy. Should you choose to go into an advisory career in consulting or investment banking, you will take away a refined ability to evaluate the quality of client firms' global strategy. Should you choose a career on the front line of strategy making in an established firm or start-up, you will take away a strong sense of how to use global strategy to your advantage.

Lecturer: Michael Jacobides

This is an integrated general management course with a strong emphasis on the practical aspects of implementation. The aims of the course are to explore the management issues that arise when a financially-distressed firm needs a radical change to ensure its survival; and to explore the strategies and actions necessary to achieve significant performance improvement within a 12 to 18-month time frame. While the focus is on financially distressed companies, the principles apply to any situation where rapid performance improvement is required.

Lecturers: Rupert Merson and Keith Willey

Managing the Growing Business is an integrative course that concentrates on the general management challenges facing founders or managers in entrepreneurial businesses. To truly understand what entrepreneurship really means, one must get as close as possible to real entrepreneurs and their businesses. Students examine many entrepreneurial businesses so that they can recognise the patterns in business models and management processes, and learn how to manage the risks and convert opportunities.

Lecturer: Phanish Puranam

Mergers, acquisitions and alliances (MAAs) are essential to the performance of firms. Globalisation, deregulation, and technological progress have increased the rate of change and competitive intensity to such an extent that many firms now need to rely on mergers, acquisitions or alliances to be successful. This course draws upon leading practice and the most recent research to analyse MAAs along a series of important dimensions related to this interplay. The course will analyse the strengths and weaknesses of mergers, acquisitions and alliances as strategic vehicles, as well as conduct a deep analysis of how firms can best manage mergers, acquisitions and alliances as part of a larger strategic agenda.

Lecturer: John Bates

The aim of the course is to provide an overview of the process and challenges associated with starting an entirely new business, and to equip students with the skills required to prepare a persuasive business plan, approach prospective investors, and get their business launched. Students gain a clear understanding of methods such as how to assess an entrepreneurial opportunity, what resources are needed to start a new business and the costs and challenges involved, how to produce a sound business plan and raise venture capital and other types of finance. The course provides an ideal springboard for students wishing to give an entrepreneurial bias to their careers, and a number of graduates who have taken the New Venture Development course have gone on to set up their own business while others have pursued careers in venture capital.

Lecturer: Markus Reitzig

Strategic innovation (or the strategy of "breaking the rules") is the discovery of radical new business models in existing industries that grow the market by attracting new consumers. This course helps students to understand how a company can discover a new business model and how it can successfully migrate from its current position to the new. Explored will be why established companies find it so difficult to strategically innovate and what they can do to improve the odds of success, as well as the circumstances under which it makes sense for established companies to strategically innovate.

Lecturer: Freek Vermeulen

"Where should tomorrow's growth come from?" surveys indicate that this is the question that keeps top executives awake at night. This course is about how to create the growing firm, and how growth strategies are not always 'designed' by managers but they emerge from within the organisation. It analyses how effective managers organise their companies to achieve continuous, organic growth. Examined are the firm's formal strategic choices, its internal organisational environment, the process of growth, but also the role of historical accident and the background and personality of the managers involved. Students will learn how, as a manager, they can shape their organisation to deliberately manage and control the growth process of the firm.