Embark on a transformative 21-month journey with our Global Executive MBA (GEMBA), designed to shape you into a strategic leader through a highly personalised educational experience. Our GEMBA programme includes a comprehensive self-assessment of your development needs, a (team) leadership challenge, a personalised strategic leadership development plan, data-driven progress monitoring, one-to-one coaching, and a choice of 3 electives, among other offerings.
Throughout your Global Executive MBA experience, Personal Leadership Development is seamlessly integrated. The Strategic Leadership Development track focuses on honing the competencies required for successful strategic leadership, encompassing both personal leadership (PL) and strategic leadership (SL) components. With its flexible, modular format, you'll have the opportunity to apply newfound approaches learned on campus directly in your workplace as you progress through the programme. This empowers you to become an agile and adept strategic leader, ready to drive positive transformation in your organisation.
Curriculum
The Global Experiential Learning (GEL) courses* are designed to provide you an appreciation of business in context. We will zoom in on four sets of concrete strategic challenges that C-suite executives are likely to face, now or in the near future.
GELs will include:
- Interactive content sessions on specific strategic challenges and/or decisions
- Senior level guest speakers engaged in such challenges
- Company visits
- Travel to locations around the world that are global hotbeds
The programme currently incorporates 4 carefully curated sets of strategic challenges:
- Leading Digital Transformation
- Leading Entrepreneurship and Venturing
- Leading Corporate Strategy & Development
- Leading with Impact in Developing and Emerging Countries
* Please note that due to the current COVID situation, it’s at the discretion of RSM to decide on changing the location of the GELs
The Strategic Leadership Development track focuses on the development of the competencies that managers will need to bring to the table to successfully serve as a strategic leader. These skills and attitudes comprise a both personal leadership (PL) and strategic leadership (SL) component. The Personal Leadership (PL) component seeks to develop the foundational leadership competencies that individuals need to function as a leader or organisations and/or teams.
For example:
- Ability to stay curious (understand and connect well with others)
- Dealing with power & politics
- Creating a mindset of ecological well-being
- Having a sense of purpose
The Strategic Leadership (SL) Development component will focus on the skills and attitudes - that managers need to fulfil - in a role as strategic leaders of business as a whole.
During the GEMBA programme the focus will be on skills and attitudes required to function at – or just below – the C-suite level.
Topics include:
- Monitoring the performance of the business as a whole
- Diagnosing, identifying, and defining problems at a strategic level
- Developing a vision for the business
- Translating the vision into strategic objectives
- Identifying and engaging with relevant objectives
- Implementing strategic/ C-suite decisions
- Continuance of these strategic processes and activities going forward.
- Strategic Leadership Development track (10 EC)
- Global Marketing Management (4 EC)
This course integrates psychological and economic theories used in traditional marketing strategy with new insights and techniques based in data science to offer substantial efficiency in marketing endeavours. We will discuss the implications of big-data and the evolving internet economy on traditional durable goods as well as newly emerging product domains. Additionally, given the exceedingly interconnected world, we will discuss the social, environmental, and ethical implications of marketing in this new era.
- Managerial Decision Analysis (3 EC)
Complexity in decision making comes from many factors. This course focuses on the difficulties arising from quantitative decision making in an environment with uncertainty and risk and presents different methodologies to deal with them in real-life problems. The course exposes you to common decision-making pitfalls and discusses how decision making is likely to change over the next decades due to the rise of Artificial Intelligence.
- Global Operations Management (4 EC)
This course will introduce you to concepts and techniques that are essential for the design, planning, control and improvement of global service and manufacturing operations. You will explore topics such as capacity, inventory and supply chain management and learn basic tools for analysing operations problems, methods for managing an aspect of operations in a real situation, as well as providing a strategic view, typically using cases, of that aspect of operations.
- Topics in Global Business and Management (1 EC)
The rapid changes in global business and society mean that new perspectives are needed to prepare strategic leaders for an uncertain future. This course will not only invite top-level executives, experts, and faculty to help you to envisage and understand which global mega-trends may be coming our way, but will also offer an introduction to some practical tools (such as scenario-analysis, for example) to help strategic leaders to navigate an uncertain future.
- Global Experiential Learning: Leading Digital Transformation & Study visit (3 EC)
- Strategic Leadership Development track (continued)
- Strategy in a Global Arena (4 EC)
Strategic management is concerned with what is perhaps the most pressing issue for strategic leaders: how can I make my firm outperform its competitors? To formulate value-creating strategies, managers must identify core competencies, analyse industry environments, and develop new ways of outcompeting their rivals. The overall aim of this course is to help you to think like a strategist and contribute to C-suite level strategic decision-making.
- Financial Accounting and Analysis (3 EC)
This course provides a common language and a toolbox to make rational decisions that involve monetary value. Understanding this subject matter will make you a more professional manager. Moreover, understanding the limitations of financial analysis and accounting will enable you to challenge management plans more effectively. This course gives you the foundational knowledge that any C-suite member needs to use and evaluate financial information and contribute to discussions and decision-making with respect to finance and accounting.
- Leading and Managing Global Organizations (4 EC)
Managing people and organisational development is a mission critical C-suite competency that no business can afford to do without. Managers of globally active businesses need to continuously readjust their organisations to volatile or uncertain environments; navigate international and culturally highly diverse contexts; develop and engage with a competitive workforce based on the business’ value proposition; and engage in informed decision-making using evolving techniques such as people analytics, big data, and artificial intelligence. In sum, leading and managing a globally active organisation at a C-suite level requires specific knowledge, skills and attitudes. This course seeks to hone and develop these skills, so you can develop and lead organisations with purpose.
- Topics in Global Business and Management (continued)
- Global Experiential Learning: Leading Entrepreneurship and Venturing & Study visit (3 EC)
- Strategic Leadership Development track (continued)
- Elective 1 (3 EC)
- Elective 2 (3 EC)
- Elective 3 (3 EC)
- Topics in Global Business and Management (continued)
- Corporate Governance (3 EC)
Corporate governance is about getting “the rules of the game” right within which firms can secure resources, develop their core activities and business models, secure their societal licence to operate, and create and capture value for their shareholders and stakeholders. Rather than presenting an optimal corporate governance set-up that suits all firms, we will discuss the ownership and governance choices ofthe firm as a matter of strategic design and decision-making.
- Corporate Finance in a Global Environment (4 EC)
Visionary business leaders of the future need a toolbox that helps them to tackle some tough strategic decisions. In this course, we discuss some of the toughest financial decisions senior managers may have to take, such as: What is the best capital structure for my company? Should I diversify my company or should I focus, and what is the impact on my corporate cost of capital? What are the financial pros and cons of having a stock market listing versus being privately held? Given your company has a stock market listing, what can you do to improve the stock’s liquidity? How do you redistribute the net profits of your corporation?
- Global Experiential Learning: Leading Corporate Strategy and Development & Study visit (3 EC)
- Strategic Leadership Development track (continued)
- Economics for Global Business Managers (3 EC)
This course seeks to enable you to apply foundational concepts and insights from micro- and macro-economics to analyze some of the most relevant trends and issues in global businesses today. Specifically, this course will discuss concepts such as incentives and behavior, market power and market structures, asymmetric information, vertical integration, and outsourcing, for example, to analyze phenomena such as the international fragmentation in trade and FDI, economic crises and contagion, the role of multinationals in global business, regulation, trade agreements, as well as other current phenomena that are important for strategic leaders in global business.
- Global Experiential Learning: Leading with Impact in Emerging and Developing Economics & Study visit South Africa (3 EC)
Choose 3 electives from a selection of programme- and school offerings that will help you to customise the knowledge and skills development that you need or desire to develop further. Here are some examples of elective courses on offer.
- Change management/strategic business change leadership
- Managing corporate turnarounds
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Business negotiations
- Financial engineering
- Brand management