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.