COURSE
NUMBER: MBA257.1
This course is triple-listed with the EWMBA
Program and the School of Information
COURSE TITLE: Managing in
Information-Intensive Companies
UNITS OF CREDIT: 3
INSTRUCTOR: Morten Hansen
E-MAIL ADDRESS: mortenhansen@berkeley.edu
CLASS WEB PAGE
LOCATION: bCourses
PREREQUISITE(S): None
CLASS FORMAT: Mainly cases, some
lectures
REQUIRED READINGS: Cases and articles
BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE: Class participation (40%); individual
assignments (25%), Project (35%) (No final exam)
CAREER FIELD:
This course is useful for students who seek to manage teams, projects and
businesses in high-tech companies, consulting, healthcare, investment banking,
and other knowledge-intensive companies and institutions.
ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S
CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES:
The course focuses on how managers can improve the performance of their
projects, teams, and businesses by mastering three processes: the management of
innovation, decision making, and collaboration processes. You will learn how to
manage the innovation value chain, generate productive debate in a team, and
how to collaborate effectively across a company, among other topics.
These three aspects
of management are especially important in information and knowledge-intensive
settings, such as firms in the high-tech, biotech, pharmaceutical, media,
consulting, and investment banking industries. In these settings, the key
resources are human and intellectual capitals, and the management of these by
the mastering innovation, collaboration, and decision making processes is key.
In each class, we
will focus on one business case and explore it in depth. We will draw on
academic concepts to analyze and discuss how the protagonist manager can best
handle the situation. Thus this course has a heavy business school “case study”
approach.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH:
Prior to joining UC Berkeley, Morten T. Hansen was a professor at Harvard
Business School and at INSEAD, France. He holds a Ph.D. in Business
Administration from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.
His award-winning research has been published in Administrative Science
Quarterly, Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard
Business Review, Sloan Management Review, among others. He speaks and consults
for large companies throughout the world and also works part-time at Apple
University at Apple. Previously, he was a senior manager at the Boston
Consulting Group for a number of years.