Leadership and Organizational Innovations for Management and Policy Professionals

Public, community, and nonprofit organizations are perceived to be lagging behind for-profit enterprises in innovativeness and effectiveness. Indeed, many of them were created for industrial age, but are trying to tackle increasingly complex social challenges of information age. To remain relevant and effective, pioneering organizations from various sectors, industries, and countries have been innovating with promising outcomes. This course intends to help students learn examples of such organizational and leadership innovations along with fundamentals of organizational leadership and management.

While the course predominantly focuses on organizational level, this course also applies to individual, policy, and societal levels. At individual level you may learn ways to more effectively lead and manage your own life and career. A lot of what you will learn– such as knowledge from cognitive and behavioral sciences – will be relevant for your work at societal and policy levels. Moreover, the course can help you jumpstart your leadership training by providing knowledge as well as practical analytical and decision making tools and skills applicable in wide range of problem solving.

Learning methods: In this course you will study how organizations operate and how they can become more effective by focusing on key dimensions/functions using readings, exercises, and case studies among other learning methods. In addition, you will engage in analysis, diagnosis, and problem solving exercises daily focusing on one organization of your choice resulting in weekly one-pagers. In the end of the course you will compile such daily one-pagers into a final report which will be the main course deliverable.