The objective of this course is to enable MBA students to understand the role and responsibilities of professionals, and the unique characteristics of professional service firms (PSFs). The course is meant to be useful whether you work as a solo-practitioner, in an established PSF, or as a professional in a commercial firm.

This course is built around the topic of managing the global value chains that design, plan, source and deliver an organization's goods and services from suppliers through to customers. It is designed to help you understand how to develop and manage efficient and effective international value chains through a wide range of international case studies from banking, insurance, retail, automotive and computer firms.

This course is not a book of recipes. Whether the adoption of a particular incentive system is a good managerial decision, or not, depends on many aspects, some of which we will touch during the course. The primary goal of this course is to understand the assumptions, the basic logic, and the limitations and pitfalls of a particular incentive system: in short, the things you should think about when you have to decide about compensation.

The course is designed to provide students with insights from the latest thinking and practice to better understand the dynamics of successful professional projects. Upon completion of the course, the participants should be prepared to act on this understanding and successfully manage and contribute to professional projects.

We live in times of polished presentations, glossy brochures, and refined workshops methods. Yet many of us feel that this way of rigid rituals and one way slide presentations is not always conducive to communication, information sharing, consensus building or creativity. Nor does it create the kind of energy and commitment that most managers would like to generate in their communication.

Having mastered the basics of business law in the first part of this course in December, students will now enter into exercises of assessment of risks, contract drafting, communication with counsel and dispute resolution.