Electives

Personalise your learning journey

Meet your personal development needs as well as the strategic needs of your organisation. Select between six and eight from 65+ electives across a range of formats in your second and third term. Study alongside students from across our programmes, interchange ideas and develop your network.

Add value to your organisation with our business project elective. Test the feasibility of a new venture on the Entrepreneurship Summer School. Demonstrate your ability to understand key challenges and implement tangible business solutions.

Economics

Competition policy, industrial economics and economic integration.
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Elements of Machine Learning for Business

The objective of this course is to expose business students to applications of machine learning tools in business and finance. The course covers some of the most commonly used machine learning algorithms ranging from ridge and lasso and deep neural network for regression and classification problem to clustering and principal component dimensionality reduction. The course will end with a look at more advanced techniques commonly employed for specific tasks in economics and finance. The approach of the course is profoundly practical. For each algorithm we provide the essential theoretical intuition, most of the focus is on the practical implementation of these learning techniques. We will be using Python. No knowledge of Python is required. Students will work on the Python implementation of the various machine learning techniques to real-world data and applications in the second part of each class.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Lucrezia Reichlin

Emerging Markets

The aim of the course is to give a balanced evaluation of the opportunities and pitfalls for businesses in the main emerging markets of Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, South and East Asia, Middle East, and Africa. A detailed framework will be provided within which to evaluate the risks and gains from doing business in a wide variety of emerging markets, particularly the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Paolo Surico

Fernando Broner

Global Capital Markets and Currencies

This course deals with the international financial environment in a globalised economy. It will provide tools for assessing the impact of economic policy shocks and financial disturbances on financial markets, exchange rates, and capital flows. The course is suitable for anyone seeking further understanding of the international macroeconomy, whose importance the recent crisis has revealed. It will be especially relevant for careers in investment analysis, asset management, hedge funds, capital markets, corporate finance, and the finance/treasury function of corporates. GCMC gives the global macroeconomic context for international financing decisions.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Helene Rey

World Economy: Problems & Prospects

The aim of this course is to provide you with the knowledge of what the major issues affecting the global economy and financial markets are likely to be in the next five years and beyond. Therefore, as well as providing a deeper insight into policy and market issues, the course aims to give you greater experience in applying analytical tools developed during Understanding the International Macroeconomy (or a similar basic macroeconomics course) as well as extending your existing theoretical toolkit. We analyse developments of countries and regions of the world as examples on the basis of which we build the understanding of broad economic issues.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Paolo Surico

Fernando Broner

Elias Papaioannou

Linda Yueh
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Finance

Financial regulation, corporate finance and capital markets.
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Project and Infrastructure Finance

The Project and Infrastructure Finance course focuses on the application of techniques and principles to structure, value and finance large-scale infrastructure and industrial projects. The course describes the many ways in which project finance techniques can be used to redistribute and mitigate the risks typically found in these complex projects. Students will work through a series of case studies to apply project finance techniques to real-life projects such as Public-Private Partnership (PPP) infrastructure concessions and commodity development opportunities

Topics in Asset Management

There are some $90 trillion dollars of professionally managed assets globally. Where does the money come from? Where does it go? What factors shape how it is managed? Together we take a tour of the world of investment management. We look at the investment challenge through the eyes of the principal actors on the global money management stage - and the current trends shaping the industry in which they work. After 5 days you will be better prepared for a career in investment or one in which investors are your clients. Please note: this course is not a masterclass in how to invest; it is a unique look at how and why investors invest the way they do and the investment industry in which they operate. The block week runs dawn to dusk. It features a parade of practitioners. The level of assignments is not particularly difficult - but the pace and continuous participation required is demanding. Do not take this course unless you can devote the entire week to it

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Bob Jenkins

Value Investing

Value Investing course is intended to teach students the principle of value investing as developed by Graham and Dodd and as practiced by prominent buy-side investment professionals. Students would be taught fundamentals of long/short equity investing. This would be done through a combination of formal lectures, speaker sessions and in-class discussion on real world ideas. The emphasis would be on real world Investing decisions with a goal to provide students theory and practice of investing and help students develop business acumen and industry experience
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Management Science and Operations

Decision modelling, service operations and e-business.
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Data Mining for Business Intelligence

This course covers the emerging field of business analytics (BA) or data mining and expands and develops the students' analytical tool kit in analyzing massive data sets. Using case studies and hands-on data sets, students will learn advanced data query techniques, data cleaning and organization, explore various machine learning techniques including supervised and unsupervised classification schemes, text classification, clustering techniques as well as predictive analytics. Students will gain hands-on experience with a variety of software tools, including Tableau and XLMiner.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Nicos Savva

Tolga Tezcan

Managing Sport and Entertainment

This elective focusses 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 and converging sectors. It is designed to foster strategic and operational thinking in a rapidly professionalizing area and one that is key to future economic growth.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Chris Voss

Supply Chain Management

The modern economy is characterized by reduced legal and technological obstacles to global trading. As a result, the success of modern enterprises is increasingly driven not only by their products, people and internal processes, but also by the performance of their supply chain as a whole. In this context, the goal of this course is twofold:

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Jérémie Gallien
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Marketing

Advertising, branding, competitive strategy, consumer behaviour, global marketing, marketing models and media.
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Advanced Marketing Strategy

Advanced Marketing Strategy is concerned with how firms target, acquire, retain, and grow customers to achieve sustainable growth and profits. With our focus on marketing at the strategic level, less attention is given to the specific tactical decisions made by marketers to implement particular strategies. Each session covers a topic that is of importance to marketers and senior management. The first part of the course focuses on a customer-centric approach to marketing strategy. We examine how to identify, create, sustain, and leverage customer value to create value for the firm. In other words, we place the organisation's capabilities at the service of customers and not the other way around. We then discuss the Marketing function within the broader context of the firm, particularly as it relates to globalisation and to the interface with Sales. Finally, we focus on marketing analytics, emphasizing the manager's role and perspective (rather than that of the analyst).

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Rob Waiser

Behavioural Economics & Decision Making

Behavioural economics is an emerging field that shows most decision makers are not fully rational, and that their behaviour deviates from normative standards in systematic ways. Biases in judgment can lead to decision errors by managers and consumers alike. This also presents an opportunity, however, for managers, consumers and public policy makers because it is possible to change and improve decisions through behavioural interventions. The course will cover the main behavioural theories and develop students' skills to test and implement behavioural interventions through experimentation. Students will work on projects in collaboration with an external organization. Guest speakers applying behavioural concepts in different settings will feature. Because behavioural principles are applied in diverse settings, the course is suitable to a broad audience. The emphasis on biases and how decisions depart from rationality distinguishes this course from other courses on decision making.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Emre Ozdenoren

David Faro

Brand Management

Brands articulate a company's strategy, drive its execution, and are often the most valuable asset on (or off) the balance sheet. This course highlights the strategic implications of branding for organizations and delivers a framework and a set of tools for effective brand management. The course offers you the chance to combine theory and practice to understand the most important concepts in building strong brands, maximizing the value of existing brands, and managing a brand portfolio. From a theoretical perspective, the course aims to introduce you to the issues faced by brand stewards and to provide an overall framework and a set of more specific tools to manage these issues, paying special attention to emerging topics in branding. From a practical perspective, the course objective is to show how the principles learned in class apply to real-world problems by making extensive use of examples, cases, and guest speakers.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Simona Botti

Creativity in Business

This course addresses the biggest barrier to creativity in business - the myth that being creative is the rightful preserve of the creatively gifted. It's not. Creativity is a way to solve problems and to think differently about business challenges.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Richard Hytner

Managing & Marketing Innovation

This course addresses the management and marketing of innovation. Design themes underlying the course are: cutting-edge research, decision focus, process-orientation, strategic emphasis, adaptive and dynamic.

Pricing Strategy and Tactics

Pricing presents managers with one of their most powerful levers for maximizing profits and shareholder value. This value often lies untapped within many organizations, because managers lack a clear understanding of how to improve on historical pricing practices within their companies and industries.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Oded Koenigsberg
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Organisational Behaviour

Leadership, groups, negotiations, creativity, culture and identity and business ethics.
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Inter-Personal Dynamics

This elective has been developed based on extensive research with different stakeholders across the school (and is delivered in active partnership with the Career Centre) and in the business community to ensure you are equipped to meet the inter-personal challenges that become increasingly important and demanding as you get more senior.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Richard Jolly

Leading Teams and Organisations

The purpose of this course is to help you develop skills and knowledge critical for leading groups of people effectively in organisations. Through assessment tools, exercises, films, cases, role-plays, and other assignments, you will gain a stronger understanding of what it takes to excel in leadership positions. This course builds from the premise that leadership skills complement the technical and diagnostic skills learned in other London Business School courses. Because most candidates seek or encounter leadership responsibilities, this course is relevant for every student pursuing a managerial career.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Michael Parke

Dana Kanze

Negotiation & Bargaining

In order to be a successful manager, you must regularly reach agreements with others. When interests and values are aligned, such agreements are easy to reach. But as we have all experienced, conflicts arise all too often, making agreements seem difficult if not impossible. One key reason for this difficulty is that although people often face conflict, most know very little about the strategy and psychology behind effectively resolving it and coming to an agreement.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Niro Sivanathan

Selin Kesebir

Aneeta Rattan

Thomas Mussweiler

Yoonjin Choi

Laura Giurge

Gillian Ku

Ena Inesi

Path to Power

Power, status, and influence are topics that make many people a little uncomfortable. However, they are a fundamental reality in much (maybe all) of organizational and social life. Power and influence are the key mechanisms by which things get done.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Eliot Sherman

Richard Jolly
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Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Creating value through superior competitive performance.
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Achieving Strategic Agility

In a world of increasing change and uncertainty, successful companies can seldom rely on their past sources of advantage for long. They need to adapt rapidly, but for a future that is not at all clear. They need to become more 'agile' in the way they develop and execute emerging strategies. This elective explores different contexts of change and uncertainty, and provides tools and concepts to help companies become more agile in various respects. The impact of the pandemic has only heightened awareness of how important and pervasive is this need for flexibility and agility as much in large organizations as in small ones.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Marcus Alexander

Advanced Competitive Strategy

Build a rigorous, analytical, and quantitatively grounded understanding of strategic management by learning strategy from the perspective of a strategist as an integrator on this course. An integrator has a good understanding of the different functions in an organisation, how they relate together, and how to effect changes in the organisation that tighten both internal and external consistency.This course builds on the foundation you built in your strategy core course - internal and external consistency in choices inherent in a firm's business model is at the heart of competitive advantage.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Sendil Ethiraj

Corporate Strategy

Gain insight into the nature of corporate – as opposed to business – strategy. Many companies are not single businesses but 'groups', comprising a portfolio of more or less separate business units and one or more levels of 'corporate' management.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Donal Crilly

Catherine Magelssen

Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets

Equip yourself to deal effectively with the issues you are likely to face in entrepreneurial ventures in emerging markets. Subjects covered include managing in times of rapid demographic and socio-economic change, innovating in emerging markets, managing in ethically corrupt environments, dealing with multinationals, building winning businesses in resource constrained environments, understanding consumers in emerging markets and what to do when the family calls and asks you to come home and save the family business.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Rupert Merson

Entrepreneurship Summer School

The Entrepreneurship Summer School gives you the chance to assess and shape your business opportunity in a robust and practical way.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Jeff Skinner

Rupert Merson

Family Business: A Guide for Owners, Managers and

Family firms make up around 70% of 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. In some parts of the world, such as South Asia and the Far East, family firms occupy the commanding heights of the economy. Yet they are neglected in the management literature, and often treated as if they were a relic of the past. However, as the current financial crisis is illustrating, with their long time scales, adaptive cultures, and vision-led leadership many are much better fitted to survive the downturn in good shape than many PLCs.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Rupert Merson

Global Strategy

National borders matter for how firms develop and conduct their strategy. The point of departure for Global Strategy is that differences exist between countries and that these differences have implications for how firms strategize when they operate across borders.

Learn to identify these differences, how to measure them, and what they mean for fundamental decisions such as entering new markets and designing the global footprint of a firm's operations. Gain familiarity with some major public databases (e.g. POLYCON, Economic Freedom of the World Index, CAGE).

This course is relevant for anyone who intends to pursue a managerial career in a multinational corporation as well as anyone who will have to assess the strategies of multinational corporations in consulting and finance.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Donal Crilly

Growing Social Enterprises

The course sets out to explore what is unique about social enterprises. This new organizational form holds the promise of tackling some of society's thorniest problems that traditional businesses have ignored in more efficient ways than traditional charities. For investors, it represents an evolution in corporate philanthropy as the original intent to contribute to society is fused with an investment approach to capital allocation. As a result, substantial amounts are directed toward the nascent market in social impact investing. Are the conditions present for this market to grow systematically or is this a passing fad? Are the entrepreneurial and management skills necessary to start and manage social enterprises different from those required for either traditional businesses or charities? What options are available to social businesses when their self-interest conflicts with their pursuit of social impact? This course aims to provide students with the analytical frameworks and tools f

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Yiorgos Mylonadis

Luxury Strategy

Focusing on some of the most compelling strategy questions facing the luxury sector, and yet highly applicable in other competitive and increasingly commoditised sectors.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Sendil Ethiraj

Jessica Spungin

Stefano Turconi

Managing a Digital Organisation

Seven of the top ten companies in the world by market capitalisation, and the vast majority of unlisted ‘unicorn’ companies, are players in the digital economy: they sell primarily digital products (or hardware for accessing digital products), they operate with platform-based business models that give them increasing returns to scale, they have few tangible assets and they employ relatively small numbers of people.

These features make digital organisations fundamentally different to “industrial” organisations such as food manufacturers, oil & gas companies or automobile companies, who make physical products and operate in the world of decreasing returns to scale on which traditional economic theories were built.

The purpose of this course is to help students understand the differences between industrial and digital organisations, and to provide them with frameworks and practical advice for how to manage and work in digital organisations.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Julian Birkinshaw

Managing Corporate Turnarounds

Explore the management issues that arise when a financially-distressed firm needs a radical change to ensure its survival.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Michael G Jacobides

Rupert Merson

Managing the Growing Business

Examine a range of entrepreneurial businesses and gain the ability to recognise the patterns in business models and management processes. Learn how to manage the risks and convert opportunities on this integrative course that concentrates on the general management challenges facing founders or managers in entrepreneurial businesses

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Olenka Kacperczyk

Keith Willey

Mergers, Acquisitions and Alliances

Analyse the strengths and weaknesses of mergers, acquisitions and alliances as strategic vehicles.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Sarath Balachandran

New Venture Development

Get an overview of the process and challenges associated with starting an entirely new business, the skills required to prepare a persuasive business plan, approach prospective investors and launch your venture. Gain a clear understanding of how to assess an entrepreneurial opportunity, the resources needed to start a new business and the costs and challenges involved. Give an entrepreneurial bias to your career using this course as a springboard. A number of graduates who have taken the New Venture Development course and gone on to set up their own business or pursued careers in venture capital.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Luisa Alemany

Rupert Merson

Pathways to Start-up success

If you have fancied yourself as an entrepreneur or intend to work in the venture capital industry or in professional businesses supporting entrepreneurial firms this is the perfect entry level entrepreneurship course for you. You explore the many dimensions of entrepreneurship and new venture creation and growth, including: conceptualising, developing and managing successful new ventures. The emphasis in this course is on applying and synthesising concepts and techniques from the functional areas of accounting, finance, managerial economics, marketing, operations management, and organisation behaviour in the context of new venture development.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Gary Dushnitsky

Strategic Innovation

Develop an understanding of how a company can discover a new business model and how it can successfully migrate from its current position to the new.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Costas Markides

Jessica Spungin

Strategies for Growth

Get answers to the question that keeps most top executives awake at night: "where should tomorrow's growth come from?" Learn how to create the growing firm, and how growth strategies are not always 'designed' by managers but emerge from within an organisation. Analyse how effective managers organise their companies to achieve continuous, organic growth. Examine the firm's formal strategic choices, its internal organisational environment, the process of growth, and the role of historical accident and the background and personality of the managers involved. You will learn how, as a manager, you can shape your organisation to deliberately manage and control the growth process of the firm.

ELECTIVE CURRENTLY TAUGHT BY

Dominic Houlder

Freek Vermeulen
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