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Executive mba GENEVA SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND MANAGEMENT

Executive mba GENEVA SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND MANAGEMENT

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Program Description

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Geneva EMBA structure

Participants complete 12 core courses in the 1st year and 11 advanced-level courses in the 2nd year, together with the EMBA Capstone Project. The MBA degree is granted upon successful completion of all courses and the Capstone Project.

1st year

The key to success in the job market is no longer an EMBA degree, but rather the EMBA graduate! What you learn is of course important, but it’s what you do with this knowledge that will create your value-added and make the difference, which is why we have now integrated this factor as one of our key values.

12 core modules (36 ECTS) 

In the first year, students acquire the foundational knowledge and skills in business administration, such as marketing, strategy, organizational design, and human resource management. Core courses form the basis of management and are completed during the first year of the EMBA cycle

Curriculum - 2024/2025

Managing with emotional intelligence (click on each title to know more)

Participants develop an original way of thinking about emotions and acquire a set of practical tools to effectively read and respond to the emotions of others in the workplace.

Learning Outcomes

  • Create a more empathetic work environment
  • Manage interpersonal conflicts more effectively through emotional intelligence
  • Apply the right strategy to handle others emotions

Strategic Management

Participants acquire knowledge and skills that will help them manage effectively in a business environment.

Learning Outcomes

  •  Become familiar with basic issues related to strategic management in organizations
  • Be able to critically assess an organization’s positioning and business model
  • Plan and manage the growth and development of organizations

Self‐Leadership

Participants gain a deep understanding of their own motivations to evaluate their career and how to make the most of their MBA.

Learning Outcomes

  • Able to build an action plan directed at impacting one’s environment and mapping out one’s career objectives
  • Execute projects of beneficial improvements to the organization and oneself

Positioning Companies and Brands

Participants gain an overview of marketing principles and processes and apply the key concepts to practical business situations.

Learning Outcomes

  • Develop a structured approach to the analysis of marketing problems
  • Foster an appreciation for the value of marketing concepts in understanding management problems, and developing comprehensive marketing programs
  • Expand decision-making skills by making and defending marketing decisions in the context of realistic problem situations with incomplete information

Organization Design

Participants explore classic and modern organization design principles, focusing on an application of frameworks and tools to develop an optimal organization design.

Learning Outcomes

  • Understand the various established organization design concepts
  • Critically assess the advantages and disadvantages of organizational structures for specific contexts and situations
  • Apply frameworks and tools to effectively design organizations

Strategic Thinking, Decision Making, and Communication

Participants are introduced to cognitive and communicative challenges in advancing strategy development and execution and acquire knowledge about the benefits and risks of different visual methods of strategizing

Learning Outcomes

  • Develop a sensibility for strategizing biases
  • Understand strategy from a process and practice perspective
  • Experience interactive and creative strategizing first hand

Human Resource Management

Participants learn how human resources human resources and human resource strategy are the key to organizational success and build competitive advantage.

Learning Outcomes

  • Explain the relationship of human resource strategy with overall organizational strategy
  • Identify how the attractiveness of the firm on the labour market contributes to the firm’s competitiveness
  • Analyze how the attractiveness of the firm’s employee value proposition contributes to the firm’s competitiveness

Financial Accounting

Participants gain an appreciation of the various financial reporting and disclosure issues/ methods used by international companies and organizations in preparing the major financial statements

Learning Outcomes

  • Be able to prepare financial statements and related documents
  • Use information from financial reports for business decisions.

 

Business Economics

Participants critically assess how corporate profitability can be affected by developments in individual markets or at the national and international level.

Learning Outcomes

  • Evaluate the implications for firms of a change in competitive market force
  • Analyze the relative importance of different linkages across markets
  • Assess the relative importance of different drives of short term national macroeconomic performance and long-term economic growth

Corporate Finance

Participants examine the role of finance within a business and acquire an advanced understanding of strategic financial decisions (Investment, Financing, Dividend) and their impact on the business’s financial situation and its performance.

Learning Outcomes

  • Assess investment decisions by comparing return to required yield
  • Understand the role of the financial structure, the financing choice/mix (debt and equity) and how it is linked to the investment decision (matching principle),   
  • Review basics aspect of the payout policy and examine the different forms of dividends and cash return to shareholders.

Supply Chain Management

Participants understand how to implement efficient logistical flows based on two methodological approaches: demand analysis and lean organisation of flows.

Learning Outcomes

  • Analyse customer demand and segment it into homogenous families for easy management and prediction
  • Organise efficiently logistical (material and information) flows using different approaches

 

Team engagement

Participants gain an in-depth understanding of the thinking and practice of leadership for team engagement and acquire practical leadership tools to sustain engagement, energy, and performance of their units.

Learning Outcomes

  • Apply to their contexts those leadership strategies, tools, and practices that maintain healthy engagement, energy, and performance in teams
  • Understand and apply energy diagnostics and energy profiles to analyze team engagement and shared energy challenges
  • Discover and respond to future leadership challenges for high engagement work

 

Training group resilience

Participants gain from neuroscientific insights and real-world interventions testimonies by extreme-situations specialists. They are invited to transfer those to train team resilience, understood as the ability to adapt to external perturbations safely, preserving the team’s cohesion.

Learning Outcomes

  • Transform your team of experts into an expert team by identifying behavioural styles and communication patterns
  • Build your workforce using people analytics and team profiling 
  • Develop teammates’ situation awareness, turning emotional and cognitive bias at their advantage

2nd year

Advanced Level Modules (36 ECTS)

In the second year, students take advanced level courses with a focus on the three core themes of our program: building a global advantage, leading responsibly, and managing transformation.

Building global advantage

Geneva is often referred to as the global city. It is home to many large, medium- and small-sized companies- most of which have international ties and whose workforce is highly international. Managing an international workforce, international business partners, or an international business expansion is of paramount importance for being successful in the global market. Our students acquire the skills to develop strategic thinking in a global context and learn from leading businesses in Geneva how they encounter and overcome international management challenges.

Leading responsibly

Organizations and managers are confronted with grand societal challenges such as climate change, human rights violations, and global inequality. Investors, employees, and consumers are expecting companies to #buildbackbetter and put responsible management practices front and center. Organizational responsibility and sustainability have traditionally been some of the key strengths of GSEM. Leading GSEM faculty members and business professionals equip our students with knowledge, skills, and tools to tackle an organization's toughest strategic challenges, lead with greater confidence, inspire performance at all levels, and contribute to an organization of responsibility and integrity.

Managing transformation

Business transformation is about fundamental changes in how businesses are managed. It is about rethinking business, its operations, and activities to create new and long-lasting value for stakeholders. Our students learn from leading academics and business professionals about the role of smart data, technology, and innovation in business transformation and acquire the skill to manage these transformations successfully.

Curriculum - 2024/2025

Business Analytics

Positioned at the intersection between data science, statistics, and management, business analytics consists of using data to inform strategic decision making under uncertainty and to optimise business processes.


Learning outcomes

  • Critical and responsible thinking skills to frame large, complex, unstructured, and data-rich problems by considering ethical and societal issues.
  • Data and analytics skills to engineer sustainable solutions to large, complex, unstructured, and data-rich problems.
  • Leadership skills towards positions in organisations’ digital transformation aimed at creating sustainable value for businesses and society.

Disruptive Technologies and Innovation

Participants examine why and how emerging technologies shape industry strategy, business models, and public policy.

Learning outcomes

  • Improve contextual intelligence through systems and design thinking
  • Identify and address adaptive challenges emerging from disruptive innovation
  • Understand the role of strategic narratives in systems leadership and stakeholder capitalism

Mastering Business Challenges

Participants interact with the ecosystem in identifying and describing a concrete business challenge for a company or industry and in developing a suitable strategic option in order to manage this challenge.

Learning Outcomes

  • Identify, analyze, and understand problems of industries / organizations using relevant analytical techniques and models
  • Develop coherent and evidence-based analysis based on a diverse set of arguments.
  • Outline a suitable strategic option for the business challenge and to defend this option.

Social innovation and entrepreneurship

Participants are introduced to the field of social innovation and social entrepreneurship. While social entrepreneurship is generally focused on the creation and growth of new ventures, social innovation is a broader concept that applies these same principles wherever our career paths take us in the public, private, academic, or civil society sectors.

Learning Outcomes

  • Able to examine the evolution of the practice of social entrepreneurship and how it relates to systems change 
  • Evaluate the revenue models, production and distribution models, operating practices, and impact models of social enterprises in different sectors 
  • Apply the concepts of social “intrapreneurship” to advance economic, social and 
    environmental transformation from within established institutions. 

Cross cultural management

Participants get acquainted with the basic tools and concepts needed to analyze, implement, and evaluate processes for successful management of the negotiation process in an international and multicultural business environment.

Learning outcomes

  • Use a systematic approach to be more effective in cross-cultural negotiations
  • Be able to maximize the opportunities for mutual agreement and manage the dynamics between multi-cultural participants
  • Discover how to apply negotiation tools, strategies and techniques to enhance bargaining power

Creating Shared Value in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Participants learn about the evolving nature of value in 21st century economies and explore with leading innovators and trailblazers how to drive institutional and systems change.

Learning Outcomes

  • Evaluate the evolving definition of value in modern economies and societies
  • Analyze complex systems and explore levers for change in such environments
  • Develop applicable insights from analyzing and simulating cross-sector partnerships

Global Strategy

Participants develop strategic thinking in a global context. 

Learning Outcomes

  • Conduct a strategic analysis and market entry decisions in a global setting.
  • Take a holistic approach to the application of analytical frameworks and tools. 
  • Obtain and analyze information that will aid decision-making.

Managing stakeholders

Participants receive an overview of the specific organizational forms, tools and behavioural skills required to lead projects with a stakeholder orientation.

Learning Outcomes

  • Identify different types of stakeholders and know how to manage those that are important in a given situation
  • Develop an effective communication plan adapted to stakeholder needs

Organizational Responsibility and Ethics

Participants examine the role of ethics and values in management and the unconscious biases that make responsible decision making challenging.

Learning Outcomes

  • Identify key organizational stakeholders and their expectations
  • Analyze ethical challenges that arise in corporations
  • Develop thoughtful proposals/solutions in the context of business and society challenges

Responsible Leadership

Participants reflect about the various responsibilities at work and receive valuable input for a well-rounded way of managing and leading to meet demands of various stakeholder groups, including team members, peers, and clients.

Learning Outcomes

  • Know the key challenges and approaches for leading a team and single subordinates responsibly
  • Be aware of the value-based implications of everyday behaviours and decisions for an organization’s culture as well as its key stakeholders
  • Reflect about competing demands in organizations, and the resulting challenge for being responsible towards oneself, colleagues, the employer, and the society in general

Digitalization and Smart Data

Students learn to identify, evaluate, and capture business opportunities based on the strategic analysis of data and how to spot and develop new business models involving the smart intersection of technology and data.

Learning Outcomes

  • Identify risks and opportunities to develop novel, data-driven business models
  • Evaluate the feasibility and business value of corporate analytics projects
  • Develop a plan of action to transform organizations from digital and analytics perspective

EMBA Capstone Project (18 ECTS)

At the end of the second year, students work in groups on a capstone project, which brings together their acquired knowledge and skills to apply it to advance recommendations to local business in Geneva.

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