Core Curriculum Overview
Accounting and Control & Risk Management
The Accounting & Control course provides an introduction to the main roles and uses of accounting
information in management:
- Business Decisions: The first set of topics illustrates how cost information is used for decision making.
It introduces the concepts of relevant costs for operating and strategic decisions: How do you use
accounting information to analyse alternatives from an economic perspective that improve business
performance?
- Business evaluation: The second set of topics covers different costing methods to assess profitability. It
provides a framework for the evaluation of cost system design: How do you design accounting systems to
get reliable information to evaluate the long term prospects of products, customers, or divisions?
- Management Control: systems that align the decisions of individuals in the firm with the objectives of the
firm. The objective of this module is to introduce you to the important topics covered more in depth in the
second year’s management control courses. How do you use accounting and control systems to align the
interests of the different organizational participants.
These topics are very much related and we go through them as a whole. With a series of cases and some
lectures, we develop critical concepts and frameworks, discuss their usefulness and limitations, and
practice the relevant tools and techniques.
Combined with the Accounting & Control sessions, the Risk Management courses provide participants
with an understanding of the importance of risk management and control systems as organizations face
increasingly complex problems and multiple sources of uncertainty.
Business & Society
The course gives an introduction into the ethical dimension of management. It will deal with two main
questions: a) the role of ethics within an organizational context and b) the role of the corporation within
society. Especially in the context of a globalizing business environment, these questions are becoming
more and more important. The course helps students to broaden their filter of world perception and
increases their set of alternatives in organizational decision-making.
Business Economics
This course provides a broad review of microeconomic and macroeconomic principles. Topics include the
supply-and-demand analysis of movements in competitive markets, the study of firm behaviour in a
competitive or monopolistic framework, an introduction to the interpretation of macroeconomic data, the
analysis of long-run and short-run determinants of macroeconomic output, price level and exchange
rates, and basic game theory.
1
At the end of this course, participants will have acquired the tools necessary to interpret economic
indicators and to understand the economic environment beyond mere preconceptions, allowing them to
make better informed managerial decision.
Business Law Fundamentals
Executive MBA graduates must have a basic knowledge of the Swiss and international legal environment
they will encounter in their business practice. Therefore, this course aims to provide an overview of the
legal tools necessary to avoid major pitfalls and to optimize transactions.
It begins with contract law, highlighting how contracts should be drafted and what typical clauses must be
included. Classic agreements such as sales, construction, employment, service, loan or joint ventures
agreements will be reviewed. The conditions under which one may be held liable will be presented.
The second major theme is corporate law, with a focus on the rights and duties of the different actors
(e,g shareholders, board members, auditors). Candidates should know how companies are created and
managed; they must be able to respond adequately should their company be faced with bankruptcy.
The third part of the course will offer a glimpse into key areas of the law, especially antitrust law, criminal
law, intellectual property. Additional topics may be proposed by students.
Business Statistics
The aim of this course is to enhance your data analysis and model-building skills, but not to transform you
into expert management scientists or statisticians. Rather, you should have mastered a set of skills which
will enable you to approach a large range of problems in a more structured way. Equally important, you
should become informed and critical users of quantitative tools developed for you by others, whether by
in-house specialists or external consultants. You should have gained the confidence to look behind their
numbers at the underlying assumptions, and challenge these where appropriate.
Entrepreneurship
The purpose of the entrepreneurship module is to provide participants with the essential knowledge
required to identify, evaluate and develop new venture projects that create value in start-up/early stage
ventures and entrepreneurially minded organizations. The course integrates many of the disciplines in the
EMBA program and will successively look at the notion of opportunity, the key components of a business
proposal/plan and issues related to the development and financing of new ventures or internal
organizational projects. The course will include articles, presentations, case discussions, and a group
project.
Finance Fundamentals
The finance industry represents a significant share of the gross domestic product, providing a very large
number of services ranging from credits to the providing of sophisticated financial instruments to hedge
risks. Understanding its logic is central to successfully manage companies.
The goals are to understand the basics of financial markets and trading as well as fundamental notions of
finance such as net present value, portfolio allocation, fair return on an investment. One difficulty of
2
finance is its language. We will discover how to shorten positions and what it means to go long. By
playing with duration we may reduce or increase our exposure to variations of the interest rate.
We will also discuss why the value of a company may be unaffected by the choice of the debt/equity
structure.
Financial Accounting
During this module, we explore the nature and use of financial reporting for business entities. The
underpinning conceptual framework is that of “decision usefulness”; ie. that the primary purpose of
financial reporting is to provide useful information to those who supply funds. The legal and regulatory
frameworks within which such information is produced are reviewed, as are the strengths and limitations
of published financial statements.
Our approach is based on the following ideas: we adopt a user perspective, rather than a producer one,
because most of you will become users of financial statements, internal (managers, executives) or
external (investors, analysts, consultants…), rather than preparers of financial statements.
Examples will be drawn from companies using either International Financial Reporting Standards, IFRS
(used in over 100 countries worldwide) or US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAPP). While
some differences exist and will be mentioned, both are based on what we would call Anglo-American
accounting principles. National GAAP vary significantly from one country to the other and are beyond the
scope of this course.
Leadership
Here is how I like to describe the content of this course:
"Leadership is not just about yourself and how you lead others; it is about developing
others so that they can self-lead"
In this course we will focus on the roles of managers as leaders and how leadership is key for individual
and organizational performance. Students will also obtain insights into their leadership style and
personality and learn how to improve their leadership influencing abilities.
Leading Organisational Culture & Change
The course provides an introduction into leading organizational culture and change. These two themes
guide the structure of the classes. In the first two classes, we will work on the topics of organizational
culture and design. One thrust of these early classes is that there are strong relationships between an
organization’s culture and its design. For example, an organization’s culture is affected by its structure
(e.g., divisional versus functional) or the kinds of people who work in it and vice versa. In the remainder of
the course, we will use frameworks and tools to develop a systematic approach towards leading
organizational change.
Throughout the course, we will employ cases that highlight issues of culture and change in both locally
and globally operating organizations. The challenges that global organizations face are often more
complex versions of similar problems experienced by locally operating organizations.
Although the principles of leading organizational culture and change apply to for-profit and not for-profit
organizations, we will concentrate on profit-oriented enterprises.
3
Marketing Management
Against this background, the traditional “Four P’s” serve as a necessary, but not sufficient condition for
today’s successful marketing. Consequently, this course will familiarize students with the fundamental
concepts of marketing related to the management of a company’s offer and its customers, such as the
value concept, strategic marketing, customer behavior, market research, segmentation-targetingpositioning, branding, pricing, and communication instruments.
At the same time, it will provide insight into and discussion of current topics such as consumer
emancipation, ethical consumption, hybrid services in B2B, internal branding, and social media as
marketing tools in order to enrich the traditional set of marketing knowledge by cutting-edge insights from
research and practice. Against this background, participants will have the opportunity to apply their
acquired knowledge in a real case.
Negotiation
When is the last time you negotiated?
Your initial reaction may be look at the distant past when you were involved in a business negotiation with
a supplier or customer. In reality, we negotiate multiple times each day with colleagues, spouses, parents,
bosses, shop owners, customers and service providers. Determining the deadline for a report, who will
write the meeting minutes, what movie to watch and the deadline to be back home from a party are all
examples of negotiations.
This course provides the opportunity to develop your negotiation skills thanks to the presentation of some
theoretical concepts, a wealth of examples of real-life situations and a number of negotiation role plays.
The programme is designed to address a broad spectrum of negotiation problems to let you experience
different situations and challenges.
Good negotiators are more satisfied and less stressed at work. A small difference in negotiating and
influencing ability can make a huge impact on your results and on your career success. This is your
opportunity to learn frameworks and have templates to effectively manage external and internal
negotiations, and gain valuable real negotiating practice.
Operations Management
One cannot avoid operations management. Its principles are present in every working environment from
the manufacturing of cell phones, to steel production, from insurance company to healthcare, from fire
brigade to the making of oil rigs etc. Be it growth or profit driven, large or small business, the very
fundamentals of operations management are present.
These fundamentals concern, among many things, the process related measures like cycle time,
capacity, throughput, quality and lead time. By first explaining these concepts and their relationships the
course sets up to study various cases to improve operational efficiency in manufacturing and service
companies. The course is complemented with selective industrial presentations, which bring in their realworld and current business cases related to operational performance.
4
Public Speaking & Presence
One of the most important skills that a person can have today is the ability to present and speak well in
public. Businesspeople are called on regularly to make presentations to colleagues, clients and the
general public. Being able to do so in a confident and engaging manner will increase the chances of
success for the individual and his or her company/organization.
This course is aimed at familiarising participants with key public speaking and providing them with an
opportunity to receive personalised feedback.
Strategic Management
The thrust of the course is the organization in its totality - the environment in which it operates its strategy
and how this strategy builds on the firm’s internal administrative activities. The emphasis is on the kinds of
problems and issues that affect the success of the entire organization. I will make a serious attempt to
elaborate on the general applicability of the strategic management discipline to all types of firms, although
in the end, the focus rests on profit-oriented enterprises operating in a competitive environment.
Strategy & Sustainability
The course offers an integrative view of how economic, social and environmental sustainability
considerations are incorporated in a value chain. Using Cailler as a practical case the students will
explore the challenges of aiming for competitiveness and sustainability along the value chain. From the
chocolate growing communities, through the processing of cocoa beans, product development, retail
environment, and in the overall interaction of the corporation with the consumer, employees and society,
the participants will explore key issues related to the integration of business and society.
The programme reserves the right to modify the information provided without notice.
© September 2016, HEC Lausanne Executive MBA
5