COURSE NUMBER: EWMBA257.12

COURSE TITLE: Accelerating Change Readiness

UNITS OF CREDIT: 2 units

INSTRUCTOR: Homa Bahrami

E-MAIL ADDRESS: bahrami@haas.berkeley.edu

MEETING DATES: First 10 weeks of the semester

PREREQUISITE(S): EWMBA 205 Leading People

BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE: Class participation, individual assignment, team project

ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES: Today we live in a fluid, inter-connected and chaotic world. New competitors, disruptive innovations, generational shifts and digital technologies have transformed the way we organize, lead, interact and work. To succeed in the new world, business professionals need a new playbook: one that can harness change and help them thrive on fluid reality. The new rules of the game are flexibility agility resilience and robustness. Today many leaders struggle to overcome organizational inertia, rigid mindsets, old recipes and change fatigue. They lack a practical toolkit to help them lead real-time and drive change with agility and flexibility

This course is designed to equip you with the latest thinking, conceptual frameworks and practical tools that can help you be effective change drivers and lead with flexibility and agility in today’s turbulent world. It is organized into three core modules:

Understanding your own “adaptive DNA”: We will kick-off with the individual component and set out to understand your own capacity for driving change and being super-flexible. This module will address questions such as, “What are the qualities that enable business professionals to succeed in a fluid, fast-changing world?” “What can we learn from innovative leaders and disruptive entrepreneurs who thrive on change and uncertainty? How can business leaders learn from these practices and improve their capacity to succeed in a world of constant change?
The second module is focused on your organizational context. What are the organizational barriers and enablers that can inhibit or promote change, flexibility and agility? How can you diagnose and segment your ecosystem? What is your approach for navigating and influencing your stakeholder community as a change driver?
The third module pulls it all together and equips you with an execution playbook. How can you drive change continuously, using a systematic approach? What are the critical tools that can be used again and again? How can you be the driver, rather than a passenger, in your change journey?

Apart from case studies and workshop discussions, we will also be joined by a number of business leaders who will share their front-line perspectives and lessons learned. In addition, we will leverage diagnostic tools, designed to give you insights into your own adaptive capabilities, and a “leadership challenge” that can help you apply the course content to a tangible initiative you are currently working on, or hope to kick-start soon.

Relevant blog: http://executive.berkeley.edu/thought-leadership/blog/super-flexibility-thriving-world-constant-change

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH:
Dr. Homa Bahrami is a Senior Lecturer at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, a Faculty Director at the Haas Center for Executive Education, and on the Board of the Haas Center for Teaching Excellence. She is the co-author of a leading textbook (with Harold Leavitt, Stanford) "Managerial Psychology: Managing Behavior in Organizations", published by the University of Chicago Press, and translated into many languages. Her latest book “Super-Flexibility for Knowledge Enterprises”, published by Springer (co-authored with Stuart Evans from Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley) focuses on practical approaches for strategizing, organizing and leading knowledge workers in today’s dynamic world. Homa serves on two public Boards and several advisory boards in Silicon Valley and Europe and is active in executive education, executive development, and executive coaching in the US, Europe, and Asia. She works with executive teams on complex re-organizations, team effectiveness and enterprise transitions, and with HR professionals on executive development and learning interventions. She can be reached onbahrami@haas.berkeley.edu or homa@pdgy.com.