COURSE
NUMBER: MBA291T.1B
COURSE
TITLE: Leadership and Personal Development
UNITS
OF CREDIT: 1.0
INSTRUCTOR:
Cort Worthington
E-MAIL
ADDRESS: cort@haas.berkeley.edu
CLASS
WEB PAGE LOCATION: http://bspace.berkeley.edu
MEETING
DAY(S)/TIME:
Mondays
2:00 – 4:00PM during Spring B (March 15 – May 10)
PREREQUISITE(S):
None.
CLASS FORMAT: lectures, discussion,
interactive exercises.
REQUIRED READINGS: books, articles, and
supplementary materials.
BASIS
FOR FINAL GRADE: participation, reflective written assignments, potential
midterm and final.
ABSTRACT
OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES:
Leadership
begins at home, with self-exploration and self knowledge. Great leaders know themselves in ways that
count—their strengths, vulnerabilities, values, vision, their passions and
aspirations.
Great
leaders also know how to grow. How to
challenge themselves, how to experiment with new behaviors, how to take risks
and learn from defeats, all while empowering others to do the same.
LEADERSHIP
AND PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT is a 1-credit Haas elective open to all full time MBA
students. This class focuses on your
personal leadership journey:
· examining the forces that shaped you into who you
are today
· critically assessing your current skills and
talents, and uncovering strengths and weaknesses that impact your personal
efficacy
· crafting a compelling, long-term vision for who you
want to become as a person and as a leader…decades into the future
This
course takes inspiration from two highly successful leadership classes taught
elsewhere: Stanford Business School’s
most popular elective Interpersonal Dynamics, and Harvard Business School’s MBA
course Authentic Leadership.
The
class requires that students be willing to shed defenses and courageously look
at who they are and how they want to be in the world. Through lecture, discussion, reflective
exercises, and interpersonal activities, students will acquire skills that will
serve them throughout their lives:
· how to take interpersonal risks in order to grow
· how to seek and deliver impactful interpersonal
feedback
· how to create trust, providing coaching and
mentorship to others
BIOGRAPHICAL
SKETCH:
A
leadership consultant and Haas lecturer, Cort Worthington was co-founder of toy
company Primordial, LLC, where he served as Director of Operations. Prior to teaching at Berkeley, he worked for
many years as a film producer, directing documentary crews around the
world. Cort also spent fourteen seasons
leading elite teams as a wilderness forest fire fighter and parachuting U.S.
Forest Smokejumper. He is a long time practitioner
of improvisational theater.
Cort
holds an MA in Communication from Stanford University, an MBA from Columbia
Business School, and an MBA from U.C. Berkeley.
His organizational client list includes Exxon Mobil, Oracle, the U.S.
Army, Kaiser Permanente, and Sun Microsystems.
He teaches the popular Berkeley business course Improvisational
Leadership, as well as Executive Leadership for the Berkeley-Columbia MBA
program. Professor Worthington can be
reached at cort@haas.berkeley.edu.