Faculty
to be announced later

Course Coordinator
to be announced later

Good English writing and reading skills is a requirement.

The economy as well as classical management wisdom seems to have experienced an unprecedented meltdown over the last couple of months. Even though economic ups and downs also happened in the past, the current crisis seems without parallel.

The course will take the current economic crisis as a starting point for analysing past management practices that can be considered root-causes of the melt-down and the implications of the current developments for the future of management.

We will start out with analysing the current crisis and explanations for it from modern economic theory and psychological economics. This includes investigating the role of information available to the parties involved, their respective motivation and incentives for behaviour, and cognitive heuristics and biases in decision making. Among others we will rely on psychological motivation theories, principal agent theory as well as prospect theory to develop a comprehensive understanding of these aspects. The course will thus both introduce the basic notions of these theories to students as well as build on this knowledge for analysing the situation at hand.

Afterwards we will look into the future of management. This includes investigating how firms can counteract opportunistic behaviour of managers, employees and business partners as well as how the can become more flexible and adaptive to an increasingly turbulent and global economic environment. It comprises discussing consequences for organizational structure, roles of top- vs. middle management, top-down vs. autonomous strategy making processes, role of front-line employees and managers in strategy making and implementation, reward and performance measurement structures, and intellectual capital management. Theories and concepts from strategic management, motivation and organization theory, principal agent theory and learning theory are helpful in this discussion. Hence, we will familiarize us with the basics of these theories and then use them for our investigation.

Making management ready for the future requires appropriate innovative concepts of managing as well as a successful implementation of them. Thus, we will also look in a third part of the course at how firms as well as researchers can deal with these two challenges and which pitfalls exist.

Teaching will be based on a combination of classical lecture parts, in-class experimentation, student presentations, plenum discussions, and guest speaker part. Given the still unfolding nature of the crisis, teaching will try to accommodate the ongoing economic developments as much as possible in the course. Active class participation is strongly encouraged and expected.

The course aims at providing students with an arena for enhancing personal competences while at the same time acquiring business and management knowledge. It thus offers opportunity for further developing key personal competences such as critical reasoning and scientific discourse. Furthermore, it provides the option to increase one’s competence in evaluating concepts as well as their usefulness and dangers in practical use. Moreover, it offers room for training one’s abilities to present ideas to an audience.

After having attended the course, students should

4 hour individually written exam (open book) preferably computer-based (either personal ones or CBS’ computers). All exam aids are allowed.

Assessment will be based on how well students understand, discuss, and apply the theories, concepts, models, tools discussed.