+Impact Studio: Translating Research into Practice

Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks

William Russell Kelly Professor of Management, Faculty Director of the +Impact Studio

Why this course

• In his studio curriculum, Professor Sanchez-Burks purposely breaks down many traditional and long-standing silos within business education by utilizing cross-disciplinary teams and weaving together frameworks and research from anthropology, social psychology, sociology and industrial design in order to develop holistic solutions

• As the interconnected-ness and complexity of our global society becomes more evident, this experiential design course gives students the practical experience to think broadly and systemically while effectively breaking down organizational boundaries

Course Trailer

Course Highlights

To address "wicked problems" such as the UN SDGs, teams explore leverage points between university-generated intellectual capital and opportunities to build a sustainable solution to an unmet need at scale.

Learning outcomes:

• Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

  • Apply a systems approach to identifying stakeholders and how they are connected within a network

  • Conduct ethnographic qualitative research

  • Surface implicit emotional and behavioral needs among stakeholders

  • Generate composite personas

  • Conduct bricolage-ideation sessions

  • Engage in iterative prototyping

  • Build a Business/Mission Model Canvas

Latest Coverage

Biography

Dr. Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks is a Behavioral Scientist and Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He currently serves as the Faculty Director of the Ross +Impact Studio. He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology with training in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan. Previously, he has had visiting appointments at universities in Singapore, France, Russia, and Turkey. His research broadly focuses on social-emotional dynamics that shape the collaborative design of innovations and strategic change. Jeffrey was born in San Francisco, raised in Los Angeles, and lives in Ann Arbor.

Corporate Diplomacy: Aligning Stakeholder Analytics & Strategy

Witold Henisz

Deloitte & Touche Professor of Management in Honor of Russell E. Palmer, former Managing Partner; Director, Wharton Political Risk Lab; Founder, Wharton ESG Analytics Lab

Why this course

• This rigorous course from Professor Henisz prepares students to take "stakeholder capitalism" into action by way of Corporate Diplomacy - assessing external stakeholders’ opinions of the acceptability of a company’s operation and convincing internal stakeholders to adapt their behaviors, systems and outputs

• This course offers students the latest analytical tools for stakeholder and issue mapping and financial valuation, as well as behavioral skills for stakeholder engagement including trust building and communications

• In a world where business increasingly acknowledges the importance of stakeholder relations in achieving organizational goals and sustainable long-term value, this curriculum explores how leaders can align corporate and investment strategy with stakeholder demands on issues ranging from climate change to human rights

Course Trailer

Course Highlights

This course provides students the latest tools to use new unstructured data on stakeholder concerns to align corporate and investment strategy with stakeholder demands. It also offers more behavioral skills critical for external stakeholder engagement including trust building and communications as well as internal stakeholder engagement. In short, it prepares students to engage in Corporate Diplomacy (i.e., to influence or assess external stakeholders’ opinions of the acceptability of a company’s operations at a moment in time and to convince internal stakeholders to adapt their behaviors, systems and outputs’ when necessary).

Professor Witold Henisz on the Dollars and Change Podcast by the Wharton Social Impact Initiative:

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Biography

Witold J. Henisz is the Deloitte & Touche Professor of Management at The Wharton School, The University of Pennsylvania. He is also Director of the Wharton Political Risk Lab and the founder of the Wharton ESG Analytics Lab. His research, which examines the impact of political hazards on international investment strategy including efforts by multinational corporations to engage in corporate diplomacy to win the hearts and minds of external stakeholders, has been published in top-ranked journals in international business, management, international studies and sociology, Witold is also the author of the book “Corporate Diplomacy: Building Reputations and Relationships with External Stakeholders”. He has won multiple teaching awards and teaches extensively on the topic of Corporate Diplomacy in executive education programs. He is currently a principal in the political risk management consultancy PRIMA LLC whose clients span multinational firms, intergovernmental organizations and non-governmental organizations.

Ethics: Value-based leadership for cosmopolitans

Gianpiero Petriglieri

Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour

Why this course

• This core leadership course "invites students to uncover the values implicit in the theories and tools they are in the process of acquiring—and consider the impact of those theories and tools on lives and societies”

• Professor Petriglieri taps the liberal arts and social sciences and invites students to critically evaluate the highly functional or idolized vision of leadership among the “globally mobile”

Course Trailer

Course Highlights

Learning outcomes:

• At the end of the course, students will be able to:

  • Acquire conceptual knowledge about leadership as a functional and cultural enterprise

  • Reflect upon the sources and influence of the values that suffuse everyday life

  • Practice recognizing, and working with, value multiplicity and the tension it provokes

  • Suspend the relentless focus on functional performance that often impedes acknowledging, engaging with, and learning from, cultural performances—our own and others’

  • Examine what values shape our experiences and trajectories at INSEAD and beyond

Article on the Premise of the Course

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Biography

Gianpiero Petriglieri is Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD. His award-winning research and teaching focus on what it means, and what it takes, to become a leader. He is particularly interested in the development of leadership in the age of “nomadic professionalism,” in which people have deep personal bonds to work but loose affiliations to institutions. Gianpiero’ research has appeared in leading academic journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Annals, Academy of Management Learning & Education, Organization Theory and Organization Studies. He also writes regularly for the Harvard Business Review and is listed among the 50 most influential management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50. At INSEAD, he directs the Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive programme for emerging leaders, and chairs the Initiative for Learning Innovation and Teaching Excellence. He also directs customized leadership development workshops for multinationals in a variety of industries.

Personal Website

Future of Work

Siddhartha Saxena

Assistant Professor

Why this course

• Professor Saxena's course integrates theory and practice while weaving together an ambitious list of topics such as big data, AI, automation, climate migration, and biomimicry, through the lens of the health and well-being of low-wage workers in a globalized economy

• The course excels in pairing the technical (introducing people analytics, network theory and social network analysis) and the deeply human; acknowledging at the outset the very human need for every individual to “find meaning and purpose in work and material compensation for it that allows him or her to become a full, independent and valued actor in society”

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Course Highlights

Learning Outcomes are to understand:

• The changing factors which future millennial workforce will face

• The threat that automation and data presents to people and managers

• How societies will be affected by this technology and data-driven organisations

Example Exercise:

Dr. Saxena seeks to share ways we can design pedagogy to make it easily understandable yet full of learning. In one of the sessions, he teaches Network Analysis. Instead of plainly explaining the theory of nodes, edges, intensity, reciprocity, etc., the class was conducted outside the classroom with each student acting as a node and understanding their edges. They enjoyed identify stars, gatekeepers and other elements in the network. Through a simple exercise (pictured below), the understanding becomes so easy, and it stays with the student for a long time since it becomes an experience.

Dr. Saxena teaching his “Network Analysis” exercise

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Biography

Siddhartha Saxena has a passion for, and experience in the Organizational Behavior and Human Resources domain and field-based learning. He is the Program Chair of the BBA Program at Ahmedabad University. He teaches undergraduate and graduate core courses and electives in OB & HR. Professor Saxena is interested in studying Counter Workplace Behavior, People Analytics and succession planning in family businesses. He has completed his PhD on ‘Study of gender role congruity in family businesses’ in 2019. His teaching philosophy rests on encouragement of providing concrete information which stands true with reference to current scenarios of business. Particularly, emphasis is on the promotion of analyzing situations based on frameworks provided by the theory, and accordingly developing own out of the box solutions. He believes learning is done by exploring and not by limiting or restricting one’s options.

Organizing in Times of Crisis: The Case of Covid19

Leonhard Dobusch

Professor; Faculty of Business & Management at University of Innsbruck

Elke Schüßler

Professor; Head of the Institute of Organization Science at Johannes Kepler University Linz Business School

Photograph by Robert Maybach

Why this course

• This course demonstrates what rapid, remote collaboration can truly look like. Co-created by faculty from different universities, the course is fully digital and open source, and designed to be adapted and taught across multiple universities

• Professors Dobusch and Schüßler examine the current Covid19 crisis through the lens of a variety of theoretical concepts, reinforcing the student’s grasp of the concepts themselves while demonstrating their practical relevance in times of great disruption and uncertainty

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Course Highlights

Learning Objectives:

• Analyze the current Covid19 crisis through the lens of organization theory

• Understand the role of different organizational forms such as bureaucracies, high-reliability organizations or inter-organizational networks in coordinating responses to crisis

• Understand alternative and open forms of organizing and their advantages and difficulties

• Understand the role of leadership in crisis situations and reflect on different types of sensemaking with regard to open communication and transparency on the one side and uncertainty and an unknown future on the other side

• Understand the challenges of organizations to communicate in times of crisis, and the role of social media for and in crisis communication

• Reflect on how organizations can be designed to respond to unexpected events and be responsive and resilient

• Understand how crisis can be a trigger for entrepreneurship, innovation and change

• Understand the ways in which grand challenges relate to inequalities, including gender inequality

• Critically engage with both theoretical concepts and practical contemporary phenomena

• Reflect on what organization theory and practising managers can contribute to addressing grand societal challenges

All the materials for this course are openly licensed and available open access at timesofcrisis.org, with the lecture videos being hosted at the corresponding YouTube channel. This allows anyone to study, re-use, adapt and share the content freely according to his or her needs.

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Biography

Leonhard Dobusch is Professor of Business Administration with focus on Organization at the University of Innsbruck. His main research interests include the management of digital communities, private regulation via standards and openness as an organizing principle. He is co-founder of the Momentum conference series and the think tank Momentum Institute, member of the ZDF television council for the area “Internet”, blogs at osconjunction.net and is a regular contributor at netzpolitik.org.

Elke Schüßler is Professor of Business Administration with a focus on Organization Theory at the Johannes Kepler University Linz. Her main research interests revolve around societal challenges such as climate change and decent work in the context of global production networks, institutional change and creativity. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Momentum Institute and Vice President of the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS). She has also co-founded the Society for the Advancement for Socio-Economics‘ “Digital Economy” network.

To view the complete list of involved faculty, visit https://timesofcrisis.org/contact/ 

The 360º Corporation

Sarah Kaplan

Distinguished Professor; Professor of Strategic Management; Director, Institute for Gender and the Economy

Why this course

• The 360º Corporation uniquely dives deep into a single corporation, using ethnographic field trips, self-reflections, in-class debates, guest speakers and carefully curated multimedia resources to immerse students in the trade-offs, and opportunities, created by companies’ business models

• Students exercise holistically examining business practice and broadening the lens beyond the walls of the firm. In this intensive course, Professor Kaplan’s creative approach connects MBA core concepts in a way that equips students with the skills needed to more fully assess, challenge and impact the organizations that they will be a part of throughout their career

Course Trailer

Course Highlights

Learning outcomes:

• Integrate across multiple functional perspectives to understand complex business problems

• Understand both private and public value creation and capture in the context of one corporation

• Place yourself in the shoes of the senior executive in addressing management challenges for the corporation

• Get practice at seeing the world through multiple lenses and in coping with the paradoxes and tensions implicit in many management issues

• Learn to read like a manager, integrating information from multiple different sources and coming up with your own perspective

At the end of the course, students take the perspective of the leaders of the corporation and seek to understand how they can make important strategic choices for their company in the face of the many challenges and obligations we uncover in the course.

Latest Coverage

Biography

Sarah Kaplan is Distinguished Professor, Director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE), and Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. She is a co-author of the bestselling business book, Creative Destruction. Her latest book—The 360° Corporation: From Stakeholder Trade-offs to Transformation—is based on her award-winning course at the Rotman School. In it, she shows companies how to avoid simple “greenwashing” or “pinkwashing” in addressing corporate social responsibility. She lays out a roadmap for organizational leaders who have hit the limits of the supposed win-win of shared value to explore how companies can cope with real trade-offs, innovating around them or even thriving within them. Formerly a professor at the Wharton School (where she remains a Senior Fellow), and an innovation specialist for nearly a decade at McKinsey & Company, she holds a PhD from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.