The Oxford Executive MBA – (MBA)

Contents

The programme is delivered in seventeen one-week modules over a total study period of 21 months starting in January each year and concluding in September of the following year. Each module commences on a Sunday evening and runs through until Saturday. The Executive MBA is made up of:

• Nine core courses that develop a comprehensive understanding of modern business
• Eight electives that develop individual skills and specialisations
• An entrepreneurship project that puts new learning to work
• An overseas module that broadens participants´ perspectives.

Throughout the programme, all participants have full access to the Saïd Business School intranet, which enables remote users to retrieve valuable material for core course and project work, and to access the library's electronic resources including course reading lists and a collection of databases.

The Saïd Business School offers a range of core courses that will enhance general management skills and knowledge. Alongside traditional teaching methods, participants are able to reflect on their own experiences and collectively to examine new methods of understanding in the global business community.

Core courses on the Executive MBA are:

• Understanding general management introduces some overarching themes in general management. It helps participants to understanding the nature and personal demands of being a general manager and leader, while maintaining a practical focus on the reality of running a business with all that this entails in terms of handling ambiguity, complexity and practical focus. The course also explores general management as interdisciplinary, international, diverse, holistic, and grounded in a base of theory from a variety of intellectual origins.
• Developing effective managers ties concrete organisational situations, as reflected in cases, simulations, and field projects, to essential theories and effective management practices. The complexity of analysis increases gradually, beginning with what affects the behaviour of individuals and groups, and concluding by looking at essential behaviours and skills required for leading organisations.
• Decision science enhances the participant´s ability to apply modern decision technology and statistical methods to decision-making. It is a practical course, which uses computer software to illustrate how to apply the methodologies introduced. The course is multidisciplinary with links to accounting, economics, finance, marketing and operations management.
• Strategy is concerned with the long-term success of the organisation as a whole. The course develops the participant's ability to analyse key issues in strategic decision-making situations, to raise awareness of process as well as analytical issues in strategic decision-making, and to argue and support proposals in strategic decision-making situations.
• Finance I addresses the most important question in finance: How should the firm deploy its financial resources? The course is delivered using a mixture of case study exercises, lectures and classroom discussions. At the end of the course, students should have a strong understanding of: Net Present Value (NPV) valuation and investment appraisal; risk, return and the Capital Asset Pricing Model; real-life applications to capital allocation policy, risk management and corporate governance; and finally, the pricing and trading of financial options.
• Operations management examines the key issues in running organisations and managing business process. The course is relevant to manufacturing and services, and to the public and private sectors. Topics covered include managing customer service, quality improvement and capacity management.
• Marketing explores the ways in which marketers seek to understand and manage increasingly demanding customer expectations. The course will develop participants' critical awareness not only of evolving marketing concepts and frameworks, but also of the challenges surrounding their practical implementation.
• Financial reporting provides an understanding of how modern financial reporting practices are supposed to function theoretically from technical and institutional viewpoints, and evaluates how and to what extent the roles of financial reporting are achieved in practice. The course also explores recent developments in reporting / disclosure discourses and prepares participants for future changes in a fast-changing, global and socially-conscious business environment.
• Managerial economics applies the principles of microeconomics to business decisions. Microeconomics studies the behaviour and interaction of producers, consumers and other economic agents. In this course, the focus is on the choices of firms and the implications for the evolution of industries. The course covers the fundamental building blocks of supply and demand, competition and monopoly as well as focusing in some detail on the important managerial topics of pricing and strategic interaction between firms.

Each participant has the opportunity to tailor the Executive MBA programme to their own particular areas of interest via electives. Electives allow participants to specialise in certain subject areas to either strengthen their current skill set or improve on their weaker areas while gaining depth and breadth across the range of business and management disciplines. Participants must complete a total of eight electives - four core electives and four other electives from a range of options.

Core electives

• Finance II continues the overview of corporate finance provided in Finance I. The emphasis of the course is on financial decisions from the perspective of the organisation, in particular the finance director or the corporate treasurer. This course takes a practical perspective on corporate finance focusing on the main decisions of the firm and illustrating them with case studies and exercises.
• Financial management introduces the basic techniques and approaches of financial management. Specific aims of the course are to provide a grounding in cost analysis frameworks, customer profitaibility analysis, the construction of robust budgets and planning systems, and financial control and performance evaluation.
• Global strategy gives participants an awareness of the important trends in the global community and the factors that underlie them. It will look at various frameworks for analysing the business climate and political systems of specific countries, and generate an understanding of international business tactics and strategies designed to respond to international and national business regulations and competition from abroad.
• Macroeconomics looks at economic growth and macroeconomic forecasting through money, inflation and interest rates. Interest and foreign currency hedging are examined through the use of derivatives, futures and swaps and exchange rates. Balance of payments as well as financial stability and regulation are also explored.
• Technology and innovation strategy sits at the interface of market and value creation, organisational capabilities and infrastructure, and the strategic management of the firm. This course explores key questions and challenges that confront technology markets and entrepreneurs who design and build generative technological systems, such as: Why do successful firms often founder over time and why are the challenger firms often upstarts from other industries? What tools make it possible to create, deliver, and capture value in technology markets? How do you form strategies in the context of technology- and innovation-intensive industries?

Other elective courses

We want to ensure that all our elective choices keep up-to-date with current developments in business and management. Therefore, the electives we offer are often changed to reflect the business and individual needs of the participants. Our faculty create a list of electives to suit the class and, if required, join topic areas together to create a new elective choice enabling a truly tailored offering.

Subjects offered may include:

Branding & communications
Business history
Corporate valuation
Merger, acquisitions & restructuring
Political risk
Private equity
Social entrepreneurship
Strategy implementation
Theory & practice of strategic negotiation

Accreditation

AMBA