North American Module Courses

Toronto, Canada

Personal Leadership

What is the difference between managing and leading? What are the distinctions among political, directive and values-driven leadership? Through specific examples and case discussions, Corporate Leadership addresses these questions in relation to the daily dilemmas of managing in the real world. Students gain new insights into a variety of leadership approaches, reflecting in particular on how personality can influence leadership style.

Corporate Strategy

Working with a variety of practical tools and high-level frameworks, Corporate Strategy fosters better strategic decision making, enhancing the participant’s capacities to make sound real-world, real-time decisions in complex business environments. The course focuses on the situations of major companies active in local and North American markets. It provides students with a unique opportunity to meet with the CEOs of some of Canada’s largest companies. These meetings typically involve frank and open discussions of the CEO’s experience developing and implementing strategy. Students broaden their understanding of the North American business environment while sharpening their decision-making skills.

Fundamentals in Integrative Thinking

Managers are continually barraged with information that may or may not be reliable. They must regularly choose courses of action in the face of many uncertainties, often much more rapidly than they would like. Do they make optimal decisions and how should we assess what is “optimal”? This course will contrast how managers should make decisions by examining empirical evidence of how they do act (often erroneously) in managerial situations. Furthermore, the course will apply some of these principles to develop a framework for developing an understanding of the thought processes that underlie actions taken by managers, and the feedback gained from the resulting outcomes that allows the manager to update and refine the thinking. This course lays the foundation for the integrative thinking approach at the Rotman School. The course introduces the basic framework of integrative thinking and exposes students to theories of thinking, judgment and decision-making, creativity, learning from feedback, and causal reasoning.

Global Marketing 2

The marketing function is primary to the ultimate goal of every organization – to create value for the customers and thereby for itself. Global Marketing 2 builds on the frameworks and principles taught in the first course and examines the main issues facing companies that want to compete successfully in the global marketplace.