Course description
Programme details
The Sloan Fellowship MSc has been designed to prepare experienced senior managers for their next career challenge.
The Sloan Fellowship was created in 1931 by Alfred P Sloan Jr, then Chairman of General Motors. He believed the most effective leader was one with a cross-functional understanding of management. He was also convinced that this understanding was best acquired after some years of business experience. Originally founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Fellowship is now offered by three world-class business schools: MIT (the programme has merged with the Management of Technology programme to become the MIT Sloan Fellows Program in Innovation and Global Leadership), Stanford and London Business School.
The MIT and Stanford programmes differ mostly from the London programme in that their intake is company sponsored and the curriculum design, programme structure and class diversity reflect this.
The Sloan Fellowship at London Business School is a 11-month, full-time, business masters programme leading to an MSc qualification that is highly respected throughout the business community and beyond. The curriculum mixes core skills and a choice of electives. It includes an international assignment and an individual project. Sloan Fellows maximise learning through:
Collaborative learning
It is energising to be in classes with people who have considerable experience in senior roles. Participants find it engaging and so do faculty as the environment supports a two-way street of learning. As a Sloan Fellow, you are encouraged to share your experience of situations which throw light on key issues. You are also encouraged to broaden your own understanding by learning from the contribution of others.
Intensive learning
To get the most from the programme, Sloan Fellows must be prepared for a 11-month full-time period of intensive private and group study. You will be expected to prepare thoroughly for each class session by analysing case studies, reading text books and articles, conducting your own research and making connections between questions posed, issues raised and your own experience. You will need to consider subjects from an organisational, market or economic perspective and work through the analysis with your study group. Preparing group presentations is a regular requirement.
Programme content
The Sloan Fellowship is a 11-month, full-time, business masters programme leading to an MSc qualification that is highly respected throughout the business community and beyond. The curriculum mixes core skills and a choice of electives. It includes an international assignment and an individual project.
The Sloan curriculum is based on a four-part model:
- Core knowledge – gain understanding of key areas of general management
- Core skills – acquire new skills and improve on existing ones
- Special interest – develop depth and focus of understanding in your choice of elective courses and your individual project
- Personal planning and development – reflect on your career and life to date and evolve your own leadership strategy.
Core knowledge
To achieve a leadership position in any organisation, there are certain things you must know. The Sloan core classes balance theoretical elements which underpin the behaviour of individuals, firms, markets and economies, and many applied and practical aspects of the various business disciplines. They will provide you with an understanding of all the key areas of general management.
Core skills
The Sloan core skills portfolio is designed to maximise your personal and professional effectiveness across a range of capabilities necessary for a successful leader. We will provide you with a choice of seminars and workshops, allowing you to tailor a programme around your own interests and needs.
Special interest
Our wide choice of electives offers Sloan Fellows the opportunity to gain expertise tailored to their individual interests and aspirations. Continually updated to reflect current developments in all areas of management thinking, the elective portfolio offers students across all our masters programmes a chance to work together to gain focus and depth of understanding in their chosen areas. The individual project allows students to focus further on an area of special interest and bring together major learning outcomes from the programme.
Personal planning and development
In this cross-disciplinary element of the Sloan Fellowship programme, which consists of four related courses – Understanding Top Management, Leadership Skills, Biography and Being an Effective Leader – Sloan Fellows take stock of their personal leadership aspirations and capabilities.
Core courses
Core courses: to achieve a leadership position in any organisation there are certain things that you must know
-Business Statistics
-Accounting: Financial Accounting Analysis
-Accounting: Managerial Accounting
-Managing People and Organisations
-Corporate Finance
-Managerial Economics and Competitive Strategy
-Global Business Environment
-Strategy
-Marketing
-Challenges in Corporate Governance
Personal Planning and Development - reflect on your life in a structured and disciplined way
-Leadership Skills
-Understanding Top Management
-Biography
-Perspectives on Leadership
Core Courses
Business Statistics
Important, corporate decisions are rarely made by intuition alone. As top managers, you will use data to develop insights and to support analyses. Furthermore, managers often develop models to structure their reasoning and communicate their analyses in a defensible way to others. A background in the concepts and reasoning behind data analysis, problem structuring and model-building will enable you to understand topics such as corporate risk, market research and forecasting, and to become an informed and critical user of business statistics.
Accounting: Financial Accounting and Analysis
A company's financial reports convey a wealth of useful information about its business. The reported numbers should reflect the business activity of the firm during the reporting period and provide an important source of information regarding future developments.
Corporate financial statements serve as an important means by which managers communicate information to various decision-makers, such as investors, creditors, customers and security analysts. However, managers have considerable discretion in terms of selecting accounting procedures and reporting strategies. Our aim is to help you understand: the choices made by firms, how to read and use annual reports and, on the basis of these insights, how to assess a firm's financial performance.
Accounting: Managerial Accounting
Managerial accounting may be more familiar than some other courses because you have probably been directly involved in budgeting and using cost information.
The objective of the course is to enable you to understand how some of the key figures available from an organisation's financial information system can be used in costing, planning and control so that you can improve your own role in decision-making. The sessions are also designed to improve your ability to use financial professionals.
Managing People and Organisations
Leading individuals and groups effectively is the key to managerial excellence. Yet, it could be your most difficult challenge as a manager. This course is designed to help you meet this challenge. We tie concrete organisational situations (as reflected in cases and simulations) to essential theories and principles of effective management. There are four modules, each providing a unique perspective on understanding and shaping behaviour. The four perspectives are: (1) organisations as structure and systems; (2) organising as human resource development; (3) organising as politicking; and (4) organisations as symbolic entities. We will look at how each of these perspectives can be used as a 'lever' to transform organisations. The complexity of our analysis will increase gradually as we learn to work with multiple
perspectives and levers.
Corporate Finance
Finance is pervasive. It provides a language for allocating resources and making decisions within a company, the language for communicating performance and prospects to external sources of capital. Our aim is to make all Sloan Fellows proficient in the language of finance. To accomplish this we focus on two core areas.
First, valuation: analysing investment projects; assessing the impact of risk, tax and inflation; calculating the cost of capital and target rates of return; knowing how to value a company. Second, the capital market. To fund their activities most companies make use of capital markets. We therefore need to understand: how capital markets operate; how to raise capital; how to make the choice between debt and equity; how to manage financial risk. Pre-course introduction modules are provided if you have had little exposure to the language of finance.
Managerial Economics and Competitive Strategy
This course is about markets: how they are defined, how they operate and how they shape the decisions that firms make. Managerial economics is microeconomics viewed through the lens of managerial decision-making. Our aim is to equip you with the tools needed to analyse, understand and operate effectively in markets. At all times, the focus is on improving your managerial decision-making capacity in respect of key issues such as: assessing and apportioning cost; setting prices and determining price structures; competing (and colluding); making threats and sustaining commitments; deciding when and how to retaliate to a competitor's actions or threats. Understanding what makes markets tick and how to operate effectively in markets provides the essential underpinning for strategic management. It is a core component of strategy, marketing and finance.
Global Business Environment
Macroeconomic events exert a significant impact on the business environment – whether it is the long term changes brought about by globalisation, new technologies and the launch of the European single currency or short term factors such as recession in Japan or a currency crisis in Argentina. Understanding the changes brought about by these developments, their implications for different sectors, and the likely response of governments to these forces, will be an important component of corporate success. To understand these factors we focus on a range of issues: why some countries are rich and others poor; where growth is likely to come from in the future; the dynamics of international trade: business cycle fluctuations; changes in monetary and fiscal policy; variations in exchange rates.
Strategy
Superior performance depends on competitive superiority. However, many firms find themselves adopting bland, 'me too', strategies. To counter this, managers must be able to generate new competitive insights that reshape their strategic decisions. This entails addressing searching questions about the content of their current strategies,
but also about their process of strategy formation and execution. The challenge is to link the internal world of the firm, and its resources, with the external world of competitors, customers and other actors. The dynamics of both worlds and their interaction must be understood in order to shape their development appropriately. This course therefore focuses on understanding these two worlds and the strategic roles that you can play within them. By the end of the course, you will know how to position a firm effectively against market forces and shape these to your advantage; how to build the resources and capabilities essential to maintaining – and strengthening – market position; how to link strategy to action at the level of day-to-day activities in which individuals are involved. Our aim is to enable you to assume a strategic leadership role with confidence.
Marketing
Strategy and marketing are two sides of the same coin. Strategic leaders must be capable of providing marketing leadership. This entails a real understanding of the fundamental business issue of creating value for the customer through market segmentation and differentiation; product design, development and launch; managing suppliers, agents and distributors; building and communicating brand value; creating customer loyalty. At the same time, the firm must be able to capture back to itself a part of the value it creates for the customer through its pricing decisions in order to ensure its long run viability. Above all, the focus is on developing and implementing marketing strategies that reinforce a firm's broader strategic direction.
Challenges in Corporate Governance
The aim of this course is to build a critical understanding of corporate governance. To this end, we will examine the five most prevalent forms of business ownership, namely: government, entrepreneur/family, publicly held, joint venture/equity alliance and investor held. Explicitly acknowledging differences between countries, we will discuss each form in view of purpose, governance structure and individual responsibility. Through class discussion and assignments, Fellows will be encouraged to reflect upon their futures as senior executives and board members in the changing corporate landscape.
Personal Planning and Development
Leadership Skills
Interpersonal and teamwork skills are essential to leading any organisation. You will need to practice them intensively throughout the Sloan Fellowship if you are to maximise learning. This course is designed so you can:
-identify your current strengths and weaknesses in these areas
-begin to work effectively in your study group
-develop a personal and a team action plan to work on in the coming months.
The course includes activities such as observing and giving feedback within your study group and a one-to-one session with an experienced tutor to discuss your specific situation.
Understanding Top Management
Business has arguably replaced government, religion and, in many cases, family life as the social institution with the greatest influence on people's lives. Top management unquestionably plays a pivotal role in promoting economic and social progress. And yet, it is the Cinderella among professions. The goal of law is justice; the goal of medicine, health. Management, in comparison, lacks a clear ideal. Too few people understand what top managers do and how they add value. This introductory half-core course provides you with a clear insight into top management's role. It also helps show how you can fulfil this role in a way that gives full expression to what you stand for personally and professionally.
Biography
This innovative course is designed to help Sloan Fellows think constructively about career and life transitions. It does so by looking outward, at the lives of leaders and notable historical figures, and inward, at Fellows' own past choices and future trajectories. We do this analytically, through frameworks for understanding the forces shaping individual lives, and experientially, through exercises and dialogues that provide opportunities for new insights. The chief means for achieving this are ideas for use, space for reflection, and dialogue for exchange. Our aim is to reinforce creative adaptation to change through insight into oneself, others and the contexts around us. Thereby, we seek to help you gain greater insight into – and control over – your own future.
Perspectives on Leadership
As managers, executives or entrepreneurs, much of what you accomplish will be through others – and research shows that leaders accomplish far more and leave a legacy of impact and achievement. This course is designed to develop your leadership talents. We will examine what is essential to your success as a leader with in-depth analysis of the skills of leadership, such as innovation, persuasion and values. Whilst organisational architecture and culture will play their part, our focus will be on individuals as leaders. We examine the key challenges leaders face today and identify critical stages that make the difference between success and failure.
Electives
Take control, create impact, change direction.
Sloan Fellows have sometimes pursued quite focused careers. Electives and special interest options are an opportunity to fill gaps in your knowledge so you can become a more complete all-rounder. For those with a more fragmented career path, the electives give you the opportunity to increase your expertise in particular areas that interest you or are key to achieving your aspirations.
Sloan Fellows are required to complete three electives but may take up to seven. Some 70 courses are offered in our continually updated, School-wide portfolio of electives.
Core Skills development
The Sloan Core Skills portfolio is designed to maximise your personal and professional effectiveness across a range of capabilities necessary to be a successful leader. We will provide you with a choice of seminars and workshops, allowing you to tailor a programme around your own interests and needs. Areas covered include:
-Career Management
-Dealing with the Media
-Drafting and Delivering Speeches
-Executive Coaching
-Leading Out Loud
Career Management
Our Career Services team provides a broad range of skills and research workshops, focusing on career strategy, high-level interview skills, independent job search, personal marketability and negotiating executive packages.
Dealing with the Media
Work with television and newspaper journalists to develop your skills and conduct effective media interviews.
Drafting and Delivering Speeches
Use the powerful vehicle of public speaking to achieve the business objectives you define for yourself, to influence, inform, engage, motivate or persuade.
Executive Coaching
Coaching others is a key capability of successful managers and leaders. Develop a core coaching toolkit, including the well-respected GROW approach.
Leading Out Loud
Inspire change through authentic leadership communication. Discover what matters, apply courage and discipline, decide to lead, and connect with others.
