Programme content
The Lancaster EMBA programme is designed to build your functional knowledge and your leadership capability through a combination of taught modules in key management areas interspersed with experiential projects, or Challenges, where you apply that knowledge to specific business issues.
These are complemented by coursework assignments, usually undertaken within your organisation.
The taught modules are grouped into three key perspectives:
The Strategic Perspective – the ‘big picture’ of where the organisation is and wants to go
The Relational Perspective – the ‘soft skills’ and people management aspects of leadership practice
The Practice Perspective – the practical aspects of leading and managing the various business functions
Running throughout the programme as integrating threads are two of Lancaster's most distinctive modules, designed to shape your practice as a manager and build your awareness of the wider context in which businesses operate:
- The Mindful Manager centres around your personal development and develops your capacity to engage productively and thoughtfully with others.
- The Practice of Leadership – involving both academic input and coaching sessions, this module helps you to reflect on and critique your own practice as a manager and to develop your skills in specific areas.
Year 1
Dates for residential modules: 2013/15
Introductory workshop – an introduction to staff, facilities and the programme's central ethos of learning through action, this first workshop also includes team-building activities in the Lake District. You also begin the process of examining your own leadership practice.
Financial Decision-Making for Managers – develops your skills in analysing and using financial information, and your understanding of the role of management accounting and performance measurement.
Applied Marketing for Managers – explores how organisations research, segment and attack markets, and teaches you to challenge and improve marketing strategies through branding and manipulation of the marketing mix.
Strategic Operations Management – examines how organisations can design and manage processes, resources and control systems to deliver quality and value-adding activities in the most effective way.
Business Development Challenge – the first of three Challenges, this experiential module draws together your learning as you work in small teams to prepare a strategic evaluation of business options for an SME client company.
Strategic HRM and Organisational Behaviour – provides frameworks and tools with real practical relevance for managing highly complex HR decisions. It explores the world of work, taking into account how recent changes have affected the process of managing and how changes in structure and process within organisations affect culture and values. It also explores issues of power.
Year 2
Strategic Management and the Economic Environment – focuses on how to take a strategic and holistic perspective when diagnosing problems, planning and leading within organisations, and explores how globalisation and other external environmental forces impact on the strategic options open to organisations.
Managing Strategic Change – managing people's reactions to change is a key leadership skill, vital for ensuring that management objectives are realised. This module not only examines the impact of change on organisations and individuals, it also explores the process of diagnosis and of developing appropriate strategies for leading and managing change.
Responsible Management for a Global Society helps you to grapple with the complex social, environmental and moral issues which often underlie business practice and which senior leaders must confront.
Consultancy Challenge – a key part of the action orientation of the EMBA programme, this involves a one-week group consultancy intervention for a client organisation. It gives you scope to test out your new knowledge and skills in an unfamiliar environment, thus helping to embed your learning from the programme as a whole. A preparatory workshop, held before you meet your client, introduces you to some of the key consultancy skills and tools.
Applied Research Challenge – a substantial piece of action research carried out within your own organisation or industry over the final seven months of your EMBA, this requires you to devise and conduct your own research and apply appropriate theory to a central issue of organisational concern.
Capstone Event
Rounding off your MBA, this celebratory event held jointly with the Full-time MBA provides a chance to review and reflect on the collective and individual learning throughout the programme.
