Business Administration (Executive MBA) – (MBA)

Contents

The first year of the EMBA programme, with its series of core modules, provides a thorough grounding in the main management areas. The second year offers increasing scope for specialised study, and further opportunities to apply your knowledge in an integrated way to project and consultancy work.
Running throughout the programme as an integrating thread is a leadership and personal development module, Leading and Managing: Perspectives and Practice. Involving both academic input and coaching sessions, this module helps you to reflect on and critique your own practice as a manager and to develop your skills in specific areas.

Year 1

Introductory workshop – an introduction to staff and facilities, designed also to help you start building relationships. It introduces you to the programme's central ethos of learning through action. Sessions on study skills are also included to facilitate a smooth return to education.
Strategic Management – focuses on how to take a strategic and holistic perspective when diagnosing problems, planning and leading within organisations, and explores how globalisation and other external environmental forces impact on the strategic options open to organisations.
Accounting and Finance – develops your skills in analysing and using financial information, and your understanding of the role of management accounting and performance measurement.
Operations Management and Marketing – explores how organisations research, segment and attack markets, and teaches you to challenge and improve marketing strategies through branding and manipulation of the marketing mix. It also examines how organisations can design and manage processes, resources and control systems to deliver quality and value-adding activities in the most effective way.
Organisational Behaviour and Human Resources – provides frameworks and tools with real practical relevance for managing highly complex HR decisions. It explores the world of work, taking into account how recent changes have affected the process of managing and how changes in structure and process within organisations affect culture and values. It also explores issues of power.
Managing Change – managing people's reaction to change is a key leadership skill in ensuring that management objectives are realised. This module not only examines the impact of change on organisations and individuals, it also explores the process of diagnosis and of developing appropriate strategies for leading and managing change.

Year 2

Case study examinationsThis is a group and individual process, involving the analysis of two cases over a four-day period. The examinations are integrative in that they require you to draw on your knowledge from all five of the Year 1 core modules. Mock exams are held beforehand, to enable you to develop your skills in tackling this kind of examination.
Consultancy Challenge – this forms a key part of the action orientation of the EMBA programme, and consists of a one-week group consultancy intervention for a client organisation. It gives you scope to test out your new knowledge and skills in an unfamiliar environment, thus helping to embed your learning from the programme as a whole. A preparatory workshop, held before you meet your client, introduces you to some of the key consultancy skills and tools.
Electives - here you have opportunities to tailor the programme to your own interests as you choose two electives from a range of subjects offered each year to both EMBA and full-time MBA students. You can also take a further two electives on a non-assessed basis.
Project and Dissertation – this substantial piece of action research is carried out within your own organisation or industry over a nine-month period, and requires you to apply appropriate theory to a central issue of organisational concern.