The Organization & Management (O&M) Area invites you to consider our electives and area depths. Two core courses for your BBA degree are already in the O&M Area: B330, Principles of Organization & Management and B431, Strategic Management. However, taking additional O&M courses may advance your career objectives. Management pulls together and directs all the isolated functions of a firm such as finance or marketing. So, management is an essential element of most successful careers.

We offer two opportunities to acquire greater depth of knowledge in Organization and Management: 1) Consulting & Venture Management and 2) Managing in Organizations. Each depth encompasses a fairly wide range of specific career possibilities.

Consulting & Venture Management (CVM) This concentration is intended for careers largely outside established firms, careers that focus on evaluating firms and markets.

• Consulting. Consultants evaluate a firm’s strategy and organizational effectiveness in order to recommend improvements. The CVM depth offers both analytical tools for assessment and process techniques essential in consulting.
• Investment Banking. In deciding whether to provide capital, investment bankers must analyze and predict future performance and risks for firms. For example, in facilitating an acquisition, I-bankers assess potential targets and predict how the combined firm will perform. Analyses of strategic and organizational issues are a crucial component of such predictions.
• Venture Capital. Venture capitalists seek opportunities to invest in emerging firms. In order to be successful, they must recognize a business idea with market potential and a management team that has the skills to pull it off. Knowledge of O&M issues is essential because they frame the questions that venture capitalists must ask in order to assess an opportunity.
• Entrepreneurship. No entrepreneurial venture can be successful without a full understanding of the industry the firm is attempting to penetrate. Even the hottest virtual or .com firms require the identification of appropriate strategies and organizational structures. Venture capitalists want a well-crafted business plan that demonstrates management has thought through the organizational dilemmas inherent in getting a firm off the ground and managing its rapid growth.

Managing in Organizations (MO) This concentration is designed for careers largely within established firms. Your initial career path will probably focus on a specific functional area such as marketing or finance. As you advance in your career, you will move from a technical to a managerial role. This transition means that your job will involve managing people or organizational units rather than the technical skills needed initially. Deeper knowledge of management can be especially valuable when paired with knowledge of functional areas (marketing, operations, finance, and accounting). The MO area depth is well paired with depths in these functional areas.

The following are brief descriptions of ongoing O&M electives. Past syllabi, are also available from instructors. Additional courses are frequently offered on a provisional basis. Please note that course numbers have changed this year (2000), as Emory deploys new registration software.

430 - Industry and Competitor Analysis. Provides students with the skills to diagnose the forces that shape industry structure, predict the evolution of industries, and plan organizational strategy. Students are trained to analyze competitors’ behavior, intentions, incentives, and to formulate actionable strategies.

432 - Negotiation. Offers students an opportunity to develop negotiation skills for a global business environment. Students learn to manage conflicts with competence, fairness, and sensitivity. The course relies heavily on simulations to promote learning by doing. It provides a low-risk setting with individual feedback to help students evolve an effective negotiating style that feels natural.

433 - Change Management. Addresses the forces that drive organizational change; examines obstacles to organizational change as well as those strategies for making change more effective. The emphasis is on planning, managing, evaluating, and surviving organizational change, with application to emerging business issues, including: knowledge management, "learning organizations," network management and organizational implications of new technologies and the internet. Case analyses will be augmented by exercises, live cases, guest speakers and projects.

434 - Advanced Topics in Organization & Management. Periodically, we offer courses on advanced topics in Organization and Management. Most recently, we offered a course on managing teams and individuals. Others we have offered include organizational diagnosis and advanced human resource management. This course allows us to offer state-of-the-art materials on timely topics.

435 - Multinational Enterprise Strategy. Explores the development and performance of multi-national enterprises in global economic, political, and cultural environments. Topics include the design and control processes of MNE’s, the role of transnational institutions, political risk assessment, technology transfers, and management of a multicultural workforce.

436 - Entrepreneurship. Provides the fundamentals of innovation, entrepreneurship, and business planning. Working in teams, students directly engage in the process of creating, developing, analyzing, and formulating a blueprint for a new business. Students develop detailed business plans, drawing on readings, lectures, case studies, and their own research.

437 - Management of Innovation. Examines how to manage the corporation both for efficiency and for innovation. Uses case teaching methodology and focuses on innovating inside the large, mature firm. Useful for those interested in managing technological, service, and product innovation processes in medium to large-scale organizations.

438 - Consulting. Familiarizes students with the history, theory, & practice of management consulting. The course reviews the theoretical underpinnings of management consulting by addressing such divergent topics as organizational diagnosis and strategic implementation theories, with an emphasis on fundamental intervention skills (i.e., analytic skills and process skills). Finally, the risks and rewards of external intervention to an organization are discussed.

439 - Business Ethics. Explores ethical issues arising in day-to-day business decisions including issues in organization & management, strategy, marketing, international business, and finance. Some of the ethical questions addressed in the class include corporate glass ceilings, access to employee e-mails, employer oversight outside of the workplace, ethics in gathering competitor information, deceptive advertising, ethics of bringing certain products to market regardless of profitability, etc. The class format is discussion-based with cases and exercises.