Mba Project

The Project is the culmination of the Course and is designed to give you the opportunity to deploy the knowledge and skills you have developed during the course to investigating a work-based problem. You will apply innovative and creative thinking to a focused research/ work-based project which either adds value to your organisation or a client organisation, or planned personal enterprise, a relevant problem in the local economy or business environment that has a multiple and varied approaches to its resolution, contributes to professional practice or extends relevant theory (or a combination of some of these objectives). 

You will draw strategically from the taught elements of the course to reinforce their interrelationship, synthesise and explore new ideas to generate a distinct piece of research with the potential for impact. 

Connecting to ‘Your Professional Future’, there is also an opportunity to reflect on your development through the Course, ambitions on graduation and capabilities in the production of the report.  

Creative Leadership

High performing leaders exhibit self-awareness and engage in problem solving and decision making with an understanding of their own and others’ capabilities. Organisational complexity in the 21st century VUCA world increases the requirement for creativity and demands that leaders understand how to develop untapped potential. This stimulating unit provides an opportunity for you to explore and extend your capacity for creative leadership.

Promotion of creativity demands an awareness of internal environmental factors so that creative ideas are supported through to successful innovations rather than inhibited by competing expectations, strategies or institutionalised routines and inertia.

The aim of the unit is to enable you to understand and critically assess a range of behavioural science models, choosing from among them in a flexible way to fit organisational demands in any given situation to inspire high performance, creativity and innovation informed by influential contemporary research.

The unit adopts a multidisciplinary systems approach exploring the interdependence of theory and practice to allow you to adapt and evolve your leadership to effectively deliver results, shape organisational culture and lead transformational change sympathetic to the needs of different sectors.

You will develop ‘next generation’ leadership and strategic thinking skills and abilities. Examples of these include creativity and innovation, critical thinking, reflection, emotional intelligence, resilience, agile, coaching, and consultancy.

Critical Debates In Business

This is a challenging and stimulating unit offering a thorough critical and integrated exploration of core business functions and the interaction necessary for commercial success. It engages directly in the sort of debates organisations face across those functions and resulting from strategic pressures. Students will develop a sufficient appreciation of the business, its functions and their interrelationship to make informed decisions. Focussed on organisational planning taking a big picture view of the business, it incorporates perspectives from all organisational roles. Taking in contemporary research insights, its bold approach lays the foundations for critical problem solving and develops the confidence to debate and deliver creative, commercially successful projects and appreciate performance objectives.

Facilitated by a blend of academics and practitioners and supported by MBA Knowledge Communities, the ethos of this unit is to create a contemporary practice based reality of the commercial world which is of transformative relevance. Students will better understand accounting and finance, its dynamics, purpose in business and society, how to interpret accounting information, understand accounting conventions, budget and preparing accounts.  Marketing approaches and techniques, branding and media. Management of operations to optimise organisational performance and strategic success.  But more than this, by engaging in the debates organisations face, students will better appreciate the functional integration necessary for commercial development, growth and performance. 

Future Of Work And Management

These are exciting and frightening times for leaders, HR professionals and talent managers. Organisations are being challenged to respond to dynamic changes as a result of shifting demographic trends, ever-expanding roles of women and minorities in organisations and an aging population. These undeniable trends are occurring amid geopolitical shifts, unprecedented economic challenges and unstoppable acceleration in technological innovation. 

In the next twenty to thirty years many existing jobs will have disappeared and numerous new unimaginable jobs will have been created. The quest for pure technical knowledge and skills to drive innovation as well as softer attributes such as adaptability, teamwork and problem-solving to maintain the human edge over robots become essential in the new digital landscape if new business opportunities are to be seized and performance managed. Talent must be deployed in new ways and this transformation must be led from the top through: linking talent and finance; focusing on talent strategy and creating a robust talent pipeline.

Two questions are key to this unit: 1) What do managers of all kinds need to know or do to be effective in today’s and tomorrow’s business world? 2) How and where do we find the required talent with flexible skills and retain them for current and future organisational sustainability?   

Your Professional Future

Led by the Executive Coach of the course these sessions lay the foundation for programme success and continued personal, professional and organisational leadership development.

Scheduled coaching and reflection will support you in realising your ambitions and this is a route to structured optionality outside the formal units of the course. Participants have an equal partnership and control. You set and own the goals and shape your development.

It provides you with key tools of research and learning at the overarching / meta level in terms of skills and behaviours including those of self-knowledge, reflective practice, working collaboratively, enhanced problem solving and building a personal brand.

Through Executive Coaching and Action Learning Sets, Your Professional Future allows you to tailor your own development through whatever routes are appropriate and anchors these achievements in reflective practice.

These sessions include deliberate socialisation between business and public administration and respective managers studying on the course to develop greater cross-sectoral understanding.

Your Professional Future attracts no credit, allowing for a risk-free environment to explore your development needs and ambitions.  However, the unit is captured specifically in the reflective assessment of the Project.

Innovating In The Strategic Environment

This stimulating unit accentuates the strategic capacity of multi –disciplinary leaders by equipping them with the knowledge and skills to effectively lead and manage integrated innovation at operational and strategic levels.  

Strategy is often believed to be synonymous with planning, but is in fact concerned with the long term scope and direction of an organisation. Guided by knowledge of their external environment and their resources and capabilities, organisations make crucial decisions which determine their future. It explores strategic issues common across sectors as well as those which are different.

The well-known Strategy models and tools can be useful for framing analysis and option-building, but can also act as a strait-jacket to original thought. For those who believe that Strategy is about being different (Porter) and winning (Grant), the deployment of creative thinking offers the prospect of innovative strategies which can enable their authors to ride the waves of transient competitive advantage.

The aim of the unit is to highlight how the adaptation of a strategic and innovative management approach can be used to address a wide range of organisational dilemmas that are effective, sustainable, integrated and digitally resolved, to meet future likely demand and variant stakeholder expectations.     

Strategy is the means by which organisations achieve their goals.   Innovation provides the means by which new and even radical approaches can be adopted. This unit facilitates creative organisational thinking within the broad external environment of economic, political, social and technological change and supports organisational performance management throughout.

The learning philosophy facilities a practical and research led approach prompting students to adopt flexible, dynamic innovative solutions to a host of issues and problems.  

Entrepreneurialism

This is an inspiring unit which supports aspirations to finance and launch an enterprise, reflects upon your entrepreneurial potential and supports you in finding a business idea and developing a business model and business plan. The aim of the unit is to ensure that you are able to:

• Assess whether you have entrepreneurial character traits and the implications of this for your career;
• Recognise opportunities and generate ideas;
• Develop key critical, analytical, problem-solving skills and an understanding of the process and practice of entrepreneurship;
• Facilitate the integration of key business skills – in people management, marketing, accounting and finance, strategy etc. - towards the purpose of the successful launch and growth of a business or new product/service;
• Understand how the process of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial leadership needs to change as the organisation grows and develops.