Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session

Objectives, Format, and Participants

This is a modular course designed for on-campus and distance learning among students and industry professionals. We focus on the skills managers need to adapt successfully to:

  • The sweeping changes in the nature of work and the workforce.
  • Changes occurring in business organizations, the debates about their roles in society, and their relationships with employees and other stakeholders.
  • Changes in relations among institutions that interact with work, particularly labor market, community and family-centered groups and organizations and government.

There is a great deal of innovation and debate underway on these issues today. This course will surface these debates and innovations and discuss their implications for current and future managers and leaders.

This year we will use the course to prepare for a workshop session on the “Future Business Organizations and their Relations With Constituents” to be held at the Sloan School’s 50th Anniversary Convocation. A group of us are responsible for preparing a paper on this topic. We will use our course modules as venues for discussing these issues, collecting data, and building a draft document as we go along.

The course will involve a mix of on-campus and off-campus students taking the course via distance learning, and professionals from a variety of organizations who will participate in specific modules of interest to them. One session will be linked to colleagues at Cambridge University in England where a parallel course is being offered.