Leading Organizational Change: This hybrid course will help you develop the tools, skills, and self-awareness needed to successfully plan and lead significant change projects at both the organization and the team levels. Successfully leading change requires understanding not only the overall change process, but also how a specific change initiative will impact the individuals involved, including you.  During the online sessions we will learn about the tools and techniques needed, and explore them through case analyses and discussions. During the weekend intensive at Paul College we will use experiential exercises, role plays, and discussions to practice applying those tools and techniques. The exercises and role plays will allow us to focus in on how to handle individual reactions to change in ways that retrospective case discussions cannot. The course will conclude with an in-depth paper that draws upon all of the course material to develop (a) a self-assessment of how you tend to respond to organizational change, and (b) an organizational change “playbook” that you can use as a reference when you have an opportunity to lead change in the future.

• Online Sessions                    10/15 – 12/9
•  Weekend Intensive             11/2-11/3 (Friday, Saturday)

ADMN 898: Managing Growth and Innovation

• Deals with central concepts and related applications at the intersection of technological innovation, organizational growth, and corporate entrepreneurship.

• To achieve the imperatives of sustained growth, technological innovation is increasingly becoming the most important “lever’ firms adopt, especially in disruptive business environments.

• Yet, building an organization-wide culture to successfully and repeatedly bring innovations to market is a daunting managerial challenge. As organizations get more established, they often lose the innovative edge, finding that their very existence is threatened by their inability to innovate successfully. Leaders with a deep understanding of innovation and change management can help organizations counteract this tendency.

Upon successful completion of the course, students develop the following competencies:

• Recognize the creative and innovative potential within himself/herself (through a “pre” and “post” assessment of a well-validated psychometric tool, The Innovator Mindset), including specific techniques of innovative thinking and creative problem-solving.

• Understand the imperatives of firm growth and why it is so difficult for well-established companies to sustain growth. 

• Explain how industries evolve and change and industry-level dominant standards come into play.

• Form an appreciation of the multilevel nature of the innovation process in organizations and the role of leaders in strategic innovation.

• Learn the steps involved in implementing innovation and the key considerations when taking charge of an innovation change effort.

Throughout the course, students work on a range of assignments, including a term long team-based project on assessing an innovative company of their choice. They also develop individual-level term-end reflection papers, summarizing their key learning takeaways and how they plan to apply them in their own organizational settings.

With improvements in computing technology and the ability to generate/collect vast amounts of data, many organizations are quickly finding themselves data rich yet information poor. The goal of this course is to expose students to techniques and technologies that will enable them to become key players in helping organizations transform unstructured and structured data from various sources including, social media, the web, databases and archival data, into meaningful and insightful information that facilitates effective decision making.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

By the end of this course students should have an in depth understanding of the following:

1) Data extraction and cleansing:

a) Exploring and evaluating potential sources of data

b) Extracting and cleansing unstructured and structured data

c) Preparing data for storage or analysis

2) Data visualization and presentation:

a) Creating dashboards

b) Creating standard visualizations

c) Creating interactive visualizations

3) Data modeling and storage:

a) Modeling data (conceptual, logical and physical data modeling)

b) Designing and storing data in relational databases

This is a project-driven, hands-on course that is designed to give students exposure to real world data management challenges. Students taking the course will learn and demonstrate their skills in using the following technologies: MS Excel, Tableau, R and SQL.