Join Our Executive MBA in Eastern Europe

Course Overview

Digital technologies are transforming occupations, business models, and industries. This seminar is organized to develop a pattern-based thinking for understanding how digital technologies transform customer experiences, operational processes, and business models. The course positions information as a strategic asset. Through frameworks, theories, models and case studies, students will gain a solid foundation for developing a digital transformation strategy and its execution with the goal of constantly adapting to the changing competitive landscape. At the end of our journey, you should be able to:

• Comprehend the digital landscape: Understand key digital technologies that have disrupted firms and industries, including those that have the potential but yet to fully unravel their impact
• Transform and reframe questions for problem solving: Strategic problems are very difficult to recognize and even more difficult to understand. Frequently, reframing the problems helps us understand and address the strategic problem. We use the context of specific situations of technology-induced transformation (e.g. Platforms, Internet of Things) and practice reframing questions.
• Use trends to predict the future: Reflect on the potential ways in which technologies may transform occupations, change the core of a business, and make an entire industry irrelevant

Relevance of the course to Managers & Business Leaders

How many firms or industries can you name that have been impacted by digital technologies? Some have successfully transformed to survive but others were not so lucky. Think Blockbuster. The disrupter Netflix. In fact, the entire video rental industry and movie industry in general have been disrupted by Netflix. Some of you may recall that IBM was a hardware firm and then, a PC firm. Today, it is in the business of helping firms transform to the digital age. Amazon launched as an online bookstore but quickly transformed into a digital platform for the world of online commerce on the verge of transforming the physical retail store and at the forefront of deploying digital technologies to transform logistics and consumer experience. New technological developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are creating unprecedented opportunities. Blockchain technology applications are being explored across industries. While the early deployment of digital technologies in the 80s and 90s was to improve productivity and later, the beginning of the 21st century saw the power of digital connectivity to create new business models. Today, every firm is looking to digital technologies to transform every aspect of a business. These include transforming customer engagement, operational processes and business models. This course provides critical insights for managers and business leaders -- the strategic thinking to successfully deploy digital technologies to upend competition and industry. Simply put, those that do not have this competency will be in the history books sooner than later.

Dr. Balaji Rajagopalan is the dean of the college of business at Northern Illinois University. Over his 25-year career, Dr. Rajagopalan’s leadership inspired team efforts that strengthened and enhanced reputation of programs and institutions. NIU’s UG Business program was listed by Poets and Quants as among the nation’s best list and the third most diverse student body among the best business schools. CEO magazine listed NIU’s MBA program in tier one. NIU’s Accountancy program continues to stay on top as evidenced by the top 25 Undergraduate program ranking by Public Accounting Report. Global initiatives include program launches in Asia, South America and now Europe. Dr. Rajagopalan has a strong record of building, sustaining and energizing relationships with alumni, government, and business leaders.

Prior to his appointment at NIU as dean, Dr. Rajagopalan worked at the world-renowned Penn State System which is ranked 61st best in the world by Times Higher Education. At Penn State, Dr. Rajagopalan served as the Chief Academic Officer of the Penn State’s Black School of Business at the Erie campus. He led Penn State’s iMBA (online) program to be ranked among top ten in the country. The Interdisciplinary Business-Engineering (IBE) program at Penn State Erie was one of a kind in the country and had almost 100% job placement. Embraced innovative practices to increase diversity of faculty and staff. Scholarly publications in Financial Times 50 journals and recipient of numerous grants including one from National Science Foundation.

Key innovations and initiatives that had a transformative impact include experiential learning, crossing disciplinary boundaries, support for faculty research, expansion of digital learning, entrepreneurial mindset, partnership with local small and medium size businesses and non-profits and economic development corporations, strategic engagement with community colleges and universities across the world, launch of a competition for high school students, and a focus on cross-disciplinary programs.

The intersection of technology, innovation and business defines Dr. Rajagopalan’s background. He serves as a Director on the Northern Illinois Research Foundation and served on the Board of World Chicago 2017-19. In addition to his academic appointments, Dr. Rajagopalan has consulted with several Fortune 500 companies. Dr. Rajagopalan has built partnerships with universities in Colombia, China, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Taiwan, and Thailand.

Dr. Rajagopalan was recognized as a Distinguished Alumnus by the Management Information Systems Department in the Fogelman College of Business and Economics, University of Memphis, where he received his M.S. and Ph.D. He also earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering from Andhra University (India).

Course Overview

This is a marketing course designed to provide the student with a cohesive understanding of marketing from a managerial perspective through the exploration of marketing problems with an emphasis on qualitative and quantitative analysis, integrative marketing decision-making, and strategy formulation.

Course Purpose

This course will provide frameworks and tools to solve strategic-level marketing problems. The course utilizes lectures, and case studies from the Harvard Business Publishing. The cases studies provide an extensive opportunity to integrate and apply analytical tools in a practical business context. Taking the perspective of a senior marketing executive, the class will focus on the design, implementation and evaluation of marketing strategy. This course goes beyond marketing tactics for a single product or service offering. Instead, we will examine the strategic-level management of a firm’s marketing resources and capabilities in order to maximize long-run customer value and to generate the greatest financial return for the firm.

As such, marketing management focuses on improving six very important abilities:

• To strengthen your ability to think clearly, logically, creatively, and ethically about business (in general) and marketing (in particular)
• To strengthen your ability to make decisions based on sound quantitative and qualitative analysis
• To strengthen your ability to speak and write
• To strengthen your ability to apply your marketing knowledge and skills
• To strengthen your ability to ask questions and contribute to in-class discussion
• To strengthen your ability to work in a group

Dr. Paul Prabhaker is Professor of Business Administration and Associate Vice-President Emeritus at Northern Illinois University. He is also Associate Dean Emeritus at the College of Business, Northern Illinois University (NIU). His areas of expertise are in Business Strategy and Marketing. Paul has a PhD in Business Administration (Marketing) and a Master’s degree in Econometrics from the Graduate School of Management, University of Rochester. He also has an MBA and an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering.

Prof Prabhaker is well known for his contributions to the broad area of marketing strategy. He is a world-class researcher, having published over fifty articles in leading journals such as the International Journal of Technology Management, the Journal of Consumer Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Advertising Research, the Journal of Psychology and Marketing, the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing and others. He has presented his research in numerous academic conferences in the US and in several European and Asian countries.

Dr Prabhaker is also a successful entrepreneur. His startups have done well and created significant value. More recently, Dr Prabhaker has been serving on corporate boards for large and smaller companies. He serves on advisory roles for large multinationals such as Motorola, JP Morgan Chase, etc. One of his passions is mentoring businesses, driven by his research findings.

Paul is an outstanding executive teacher, having won Best-Teacher-of-the-Year award four times in three different universities and an MBA Professor-of-the-year award. His Executive Education sessions have been hosted by British Petroleum, Chase Bank, Motorola, etc., and are top-rated in numerous countries including France, China, Spain, Colombia, Egypt, Turkey, etc. He is currently contracted to run Business Strategy workshops for senior bankers in Madrid, Spain, government agencies in Azherbaijan, etc.

Dr. Prabhaker is a Fulbright Specialist. He has served on United States government assignments to Macedonia, Kosovo and Egypt. His specialty is architecting higher education institutions such as universities and institutions for a specific national context. He has served as an advisor to the Prime Minister’s office in Egypt and as an educational partner to the Interior Ministry for the Turkish government. He is also well known for creating the Center for Peace at Tetovo University in Macedonia and partnering with the European Union to fund this center. Dr Prabhaker has successfully negotiated partnerships with the governments of Egypt, Turkey, Macedonia, China, etc. He has also set up very productive academic partnerships with universities in several other countries including Kosovo, Macedonia, Spain, France, etc.

Paul has been involved in leadership positions at accredited US universities for two decades as Vice-President, Dean and Associate Dean. He has led two universities to successful initial AACSB accreditation and three universities through the maintenance of AACSB accreditation. Among many other board appointments, Dr. Prabhaker is the Vice-Chair of the Central Asian Pacific Research

Council and is a founding member of the Advisory Board of Greatlakes Institute of Management in Chennai, India, etc

Paul has reviewed over a dozen textbooks in marketing, for publishers such as Prentice-Hall. He is a member of the American Marketing Association, The Institute of Management Sciences, the Decision Sciences Institute, the Academy of Marketing Science and the Production & Management Society.

Based on his scholarly contributions in academia and his professional contributions to management practitioners, Dr. Prabhaker has been nominated and listed in Who’s Who in the East (1987), Who’s Who in Advertising (1990) and Who’s Who in the World (1991).

Course Overview

The course is about performance: which firms win, which firms lose, and why. We challenge basic assumptions about business and strategy, beginning with understanding what “performance” really means. Some of the key questions we will address in this course include:

• How do managers help gain and sustain competitive advantage for their firms?
• What are the key factors that determine performance?
• How should we compete in our business?
• In which businesses or industries should we compete?

MGMT is an integrative course which is designed to pull together, through the concept of strategy, what you have learned in various functional areas of accounting, finance, marketing, economics, and operations. To be successful, managers must recognize the systemic nature of organizations. That is, strategies must be consistent with the internal and external environments of the firm, and all functional-level decisions need to be consistent with and supportive of the overall strategy. It is important to recognize and understand how decisions in one area ripple throughout an organization. In this course you will bring together all of the business fundamentals and use them to study company-wide, organizational issues.

Strategic thinking, or the ability to think broadly and opportunistically at all levels in the organization within the context of a larger corporate vision, is considered key to competitive advantage. This course is designed to help you develop the strategic thinking skills and integration abilities necessary to apply your business education to the overall management function within an organization.

Course Objective

• To acquire familiarity with the principal concepts, frameworks, and techniques of strategic management.
• To gain expertise in applying these concepts, frameworks, and techniques in order to:
  • understand why a company performs well or poorly,
  • generate strategic options for a company,
  • assess available options under conditions of imperfect knowledge,
  • select the most appropriate strategy, and
  • recommend the best means of implementing the chosen strategy.
• To develop your ability to integrate functional knowledge, behavioral and ethical concepts, and analytical tools learned separately in more specialized courses.
• To examine the processes through which competitive strategies are formulated and implemented within organizations.
• To cultivate an appreciation of the complex and dynamic conditions, the challenging questions, and the conflicting responsibilities facing general managers.
• To enhance individual and team analytical, communication, and decision-making skills when addressing integrative, strategic issues.

Devaki Rau earned her Ph.D. from University of Minnesota (2001). Her expertise and interests are in organizational learning, expertise, strategic decision-making and top management teams. Prior to joining NIU, she worked in the Indian software industry. Her primary teaching responsibilities are in the area of strategic management at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her research has been published in the Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Small Group Research, Group and Organization Management and the Journal of Business Research, among others. She has also co-authored a text on strategy: Behavioral Strategic Management. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the Strategic Management Journal and Group and Organization Management.

Course Description

Examination of concepts, issues, and methodologies related to design and administration of supply chain systems. Emphasis on executive-level decision making and the impact of supply chain management on organizational performance. Includes supply chain strategy, strategic alliances, supplier and customer relationships, use of technology, and the integration of logistical operations in the attainment of organizational objectives in a global competitive environment.

Course Objectives

• Introduce the general concepts of supply chain management.
• Understand the processes involved in supply chain management.
• Understand how to develop and manage efficient and effective global supply chains.
• Understand how technology and coordination work as enablers to provide leverage in gaining and maintaining competitive advantage in the marketplace.
• To develop quantitative and qualitative problem-solving skills.

Charles G. Petersen is a Dean’s Distinguished Professor of OM&IS at Northern Illinois University. He earned a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Iowa State University, a M.B.A. from Washington University, and a Ph.D. in Operations Management from Indiana University. Dr. Petersen teaches courses in supply chain management and supply chain analytics. He has conducted extensive research in supply chain management and distribution center operations and his scholarly work has been published in Production and Operations Management (A Financial Times Top 50 Journal), Decision Sciences, International Journal of Production Research, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, International Journal of Production Economics, and International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management.

Course Description

Analysis of current and future financial position that serves as the foundation for decision making by creditors, managers, and owners. Includes ratio analysis, sources and uses of funds, operating and financial leverage, capital budgeting under risk and uncertainty, the cost of capital, and the financial structure. A problem-oriented course, but cases and readings may be utilized.

Course Objective

This course is about wealth creation. The objective of this course is to introduce students to the analytic tools used in financial decision making. We will examine how both the individual investor and the corporate manager make decisions that create wealth and consider how financial instruments and markets are utilized to facilitate wealth creation. Our focus is wealth creation by the firm. We will survey the concepts and techniques for decision making concerning the firm’s investment and financing decisions. Three types of higher-level thinking skills will be promoted and evaluated, as follows.

• Comprehension: to be able to explain an idea using a variety of approaches that include words, graphs and math.
• Integration: to be able to understand connections between various concepts that we study.
• Critical thinking: to apply the ideas learned in one area to evaluate and solve problems in another area.

We assume that among firm objectives is the creation of wealth for shareholders in an ethical and legal manner. The creation of wealth for shareholders in an ethical and legal manner is the guiding principle for this course. Course materials are organized around three main topics (see Daily Schedule for more detail).

The course begins by first examining how much the capital markets will pay for a security sold by the firm. Central to this first topic is a solid understanding of a capital asset pricing theory. We, as firm managers, need some theory of capital market pricing before we can sit down at our desk to evaluate, select, and manage business projects. This follows as the capital markets are the source of the funds we invest. We need to understand shareholder value before we go about trying to create additional shareholder value.

Second, we examine how wealth is created through an optimal firm-level investment policy, while operating globally. We focus on understanding the key intuition behind alternative project evaluation techniques.

Understanding how various aspects of financial economics affects project value has numerous practical implications. The practical, applied knowledge and the related skills we refine in this course are designed to further enhance the professional manager’s leadership capacity. One way this manifests itself is by the manager thinking, speaking and managing insightfully with regard to why risk and return, capital markets, the law of one price, alternative valuation techniques, alternative capital budgeting tools, etc. effect the creation of wealth by managers managing real projects.

Dr. Lei Zhou is the Jones, Diedrich, Mennie Professor of Finance and a CFA charterholder at Northern Illinois University and. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 2002. His research focuses on fixed-income securities, credit ratings, and mutual funds. Dr. Zhou’s research has been published in premier finance journals, including Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, Journal of Banking and Finance, Financial Management, and Journal of Corporate Finance. Prior to joining NIU in 2005, Dr. Zhou had taught at Miami University of Ohio. Dr. Zhou also worked at the US Securities and Exchange Commission as an Academic Visiting Scholar from 2017-2018.

Course Overview

This course introduces students to leveraging artificial intelligence technologies in Business. Topics in this course include the core concepts of artificial intelligence, such as machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), deep-learning vision analysis, AI apps and social robots (e.g., Amazon Alexa, Siri). Based on the understanding of these topics, students apply AI technologies in identifying and solving a wide range of problems within a business framework.

Yongwoog “Andy” Jeon (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) teaches and researches the applications of various emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) in Business. He strives for methodological innovations by building AI research platforms such as the CNN-based chatbot platform (http://s3.socialbotscience.com/v3/) to gather and analyse actual behaviours such as conversation with the chatbot and gaze-tracking data to provide practical and Realistic findings. He collaborated with his colleagues to present and publish works on AI, VR, Metaverse, and other emerging technologies in marketing.

Course Overview and Objectives

The purpose of the course is to increase your ability to effectively understand, analyze, manage and (when necessary) intervene in your own and others’ individual and collective behavior within organizational contexts. On a more basic level, this course teaches you to understand and manage people in the context of work organizations.

To this end, we will focus our study upon such topics as leadership, careers, power, conflict, values, personality, motivation, group dynamics, teams, organizational culture, international culture, organizational structure, and organizational change. This will be done primarily through utilizing principles of organizational behavior (OB) and in the context of ever-increasing changes in careers and organizations.

Our topic of study and learning will focus primarily upon leading and managing at three levels:

• the individual level (yourself)
• the interpersonal level (including teams and groups)
• the organizational level

The primary learning objectives of the course are for you to gain:

• greater self understanding (in the context of becoming a more effective manager/leader and a more satisfied “careerist”)
• greater understanding of ongoing and contemporary organizational problems, opportunities and issues
• theoretical and practical concepts and tools you can use to manage self/others and diagnose/change organizations

Amanda Ferguson is an associate professor in the Department of Management at NIU. She earned her Ph.D. in organisational behaviour at London Business School (2012). Her research focuses on the role of team composition and team processes on team effectiveness. Professor Ferguson's work has been published in outlets such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, and Journal of Applied Psychology. Prior to studying at London Business School, Professor Ferguson worked as a senior sales representative at Eli Lilly and Company in St. Louis and earned her B.S./M.B.A. degrees at Missouri State University.

Course Objectives and Learning Outcomes

The overall course objective is to facilitate further development of leadership skills and capacity to effectively lead.

The faculty will strive:

• to personalize the course content to each student,
• to find ways to connect course content to students’ prior knowledge,
• to actively engage students in the process of discovery about leadership, and
• to ensure that students will reflect on their experiences inside and outside the course in order to maximize the insights they gain about themselves and leadership.

To create the conditions in which you can increase your skills and capacity to lead, we will target both the science of leadership (focusing on what data tells us are the best leadership practices) as well as the art of leadership (meaningful practice leading through engaging in activities like interpersonal interaction, communication, and influence; public presenting, communication, and persuasion; strategy and decision making; critical feedback). In conjunction with the class, students should build skills related to the following:

• critical thinking to analyze business problems facing leaders,
• communicating persuasively through a variety of mediums,
• leading effectively, and
• using models to determine the ethical implications of leadership decisions.

This class is administered in such a way as to seek to maximize the value you get from the course by focusing your time and attention on the areas of greatest impact for your leadership development.

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Brian McCormick earned his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa (2014). Drawn from his years of experience in coaching and administration, Brian pursues research questions targeted at the determinants of individual and team performance. Specifically, he studies leadership, employee individual differences, and team composition as the critical factors that can help (or hinder) success. Brian’s research appears in publications such as Journal of Management, Journal of Applied Psychology, Academy of Management Journal, and Personnel Psychology. He teaches managerial leadership, staffing, and human resources courses, communicates with media on a variety of leadership topics, and consults with companies on leadership, recruiting, and selecting high potential employees.