Strategic Perspectives of Global Management ((3 Credits))

Catalog description

Strategic Perspectives of Global Management is one of the two introductory courses in the MBA program and focuses on expanding one's perspectives -- strategic, geographic, cultural and ethical. The goal is to enhance our appreciation of the richness of the multinational environments in which many businesses find themselves today. While global environments offer additional dimensions along which executives can add value, it also imposes additional constraints. For example, a supply chain manager faces vastly greater opportunities for value-adding locational investments in global environments, but must navigate complex and varied political and legal issues varying from one locale to another, best treated as constraints on their optimizing efforts. Further, many ethical executives who depend on statutory authorities to level the playing field while requiring ethical behavior of all players at home, find that they must make potentially costly ethical decisions about how and when they will treat their employees, their suppliers, and foreign environments better than those environments demand of them either de jure, de facto or both. Thus, global management often requires an additional layer of ethical reasoning that goes beyond domestic executive decision making. The goal of SPGM is thus to broaden the perspectives of first year MBA students by providing practice with a variety of strategic, geographic and ethical tools in varied case applications involving global business practice.