The Kellogg-Schulich EMBA Program Design
The overall design of the Kellogg-Schulich Executive MBA is efficient, flexible and balanced. The program begins in January and ends in May of the following year. The class schedule minimizes time away from work and maximizes in-class and study team learning.
Five learning formats
- Classes every 3rd weekend
- Live-in weeks at Schulich and Kellogg (USA)
- International week at Schulich
- Choice of Global electives
- Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation project overseas
2024-25 Schedule* (click for details on class dates)
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Year 1
Becoming A Global Leader
January 12-18Mastering The Fundamentals I
January 27 & February 3, 10
February 23-25
March 15-17
April 5-7Mastering The Fundamentals II
April 26-28
May 10-12, 30-31
June 1-2Summer Break
Managing For Excellence
One week in August (USA)Leadership in Action
September 13-15
October 4-6, 25-27Making an Impact
Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Project
One week in November (Costa Rica) -
Year 2
Leveraging Global Perspectives
Choice of Global Electives offered between January and MaySchulich Global Weekend**
One extended weekend in MarchSchulich Global Week**
One week in April* Course offerings and schedule are subject to change. Students are responsible for their travel costs, including obtaining the necessary immigration/visa documentation to study in Canada (where applicable), to enter the United States to study and to travel to the country of destination for the Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation project, and for the Global Electives Modules in order to complete the program requirements of the Kellogg-Schulich Executive MBA Program.
** This is a non-residential module for the Kellogg-Schulich students.
Core courses at the Schulich School of Business*
The course content of the Kellogg-Schulich EMBA ensures that you develop a strong knowledge base and skill set in all major areas of management. And because key management themes are integrated across the curriculum, you deepen your understanding of them and learn how each can best be applied in all your decision-making.
The following section provides detailed descriptions of the courses in the core curriculum. All are required for Kellogg-Schulich EMBA students. The curriculum has been developed jointly by the Kellogg School of Management, the Schulich School of Business and our global business school alliance partners in North America, Asia, and Europe.
The core curriculum is organized into the five key areas identified by corporations as their “most wanted skills.” These include leadership, strategic thinking, cross-functionality, ability to drive results and core financial understanding.
Leadership
Through this cluster of courses, you gain the perspective of a senior executive – how to manage change in turbulent environments, gain the global perspective that is essential to business today and, of course, lead socially responsible organizations.
ViewHide coursesAuthentic Leadership Journey
This course challenges students to reflect on a recurring question that will manifest itself during the journey of their careers: “what kind of leader do I want to be?” To hone this reflection, students will engage as a group with leaders during class sessions, and in one‐on‐one interviews with leaders outside of class. By the end of the EMBA program, students will be in a position to construct a reflection that answers the question on what type of leader they think they would like to be. The reflection, the main deliverable for the course, will be a dynamic and evolving personal manifesto of sorts, a starting point that will be returned to time and again as students continue on their journey of leadership and fashion a fit between their leadership style and organizational realities.
Leadership and Organizations
Explores individual and group behaviour in organizations with a focus on how to work with and lead people, identify and improve team-level responses, and manage conflicts more effectively. Topics include team dynamics, decision-making, leadership and conflict management.
Managing Globally
Familiarizes students with the challenges faced by global managers and discusses ways in which they can be mastered successfully. The course is unique in that it uses historical case studies, based on the idea that what has worked in the past (or not) can provide important insights for a global manager today. Cases cover a wide range of time periods, geographic locations and sectors. While not the primary purpose of the course, the comparison with global business in earlier periods will also help identify the specific features of the current global economy.
Responsible Business Leadership
This course introduces students to five fundamental strategies companies use to respond to growing pressures to adopt more responsible business practices. Through these strategies, students will develop an understanding of the major causes that leave companies at odds with society and how responsible business leadership requires graduates to challenge the fundamental institutions that guide industrial activity.
Strategic Thinking
Through this cluster of courses, you gain a general management perspective, thereby enhancing your ability to see “the big picture” – the strategic perspective that drives the decision-making of senior executives.
ViewHide coursesCompetitive Strategy
Presents the economic foundations necessary for the successful strategic management of organizations. Strategic management is a principal role of the general manager, who is responsible for the success of the organization as a whole. In this course, students will develop concepts and frameworks that will be useful to the general manager in formulating and analyzing strategy.
Digital Strategy
This course will answer three critical questions facing organizations today: why do they need to transform?, what do they need to transform?, and how can they transform? The orientation of the course is organizational and strategic. While digital technologies are discussed such as analytics and big data, virtual reality, cloud and mobile technologies, blockchain, etc., the focus will be on how to improve individual and organizational performance. The course deals with the effective management of capabilities generated from digital technologies, rather than the technologies themselves.
Strategic Crisis Management
Focuses on crisis management from the point of view of managers and consultants. To anticipate and manage crises successfully, managers need to combine strategic thinking with an awareness of the importance of the ethical dimensions of business. That is, managers not only need to understand the motivations and strategic capabilities of stakeholders, but also should appreciate the importance of value-based management in preventing and managing corporate crises. This class is based on experience-learning: a rich set of case studies and crisis simulation exercises balance the theoretical and conceptual frameworks and will help participants to improve their strategic thinking as well as team management and communication skills in high-stress situations.
Strategic Decisions in Operations
Examines how strategic operational decisions impact the performance of the firm. The key will be to understand the link between operations configurations, the customer experience, and the financial performance of the firm. The course approaches operations strategy by taking a holistic view that incorporates competitive strategy, financial evaluation, and the customer experience.
You can also further enhance your strategic skills by taking electives in this area such as "Analytical Decision Modeling" or"Game Theory".
Cross-Functionality
General managers must adopt an integrative, cross-functional approach to decisionmaking, one that requires an understanding of all the component parts of a business enterprise. These courses expose you to functional areas of management previously outside your experience, and they relate those areas with which you are already familiar to a general management context.
ViewHide coursesFinancial Management
Explores the strategic decisions that lead to capital spending. The risk element in financial decision-making and financial instruments that have evolved to re-allocate risk in the economy are discussed. Important concepts and principles of financial management are examined using both theory and cases.
Management Planning and Control
Examines the use and usefulness of accounting information in management decision-making, including strategy formulation and implementation. Emphasis is on the use of financial and non-financial information by firms working in an increasingly international environment. The course explores new models and approaches to management planning and control including the “balanced scorecard” methodology, activity-based costing and management-incentive systems.
Marketing
Presents an integrative, dynamic view of competitive marketing strategy with a focus on both developing and executing a strategy. This course also makes an important distinction between customer advantage and competitive advantage. It provides a framework to develop marketing strategies that yields a distinctive customer advantage based on customer and competitor analysis.
Operations Management
Examines operations management in both manufacturing and service organizations and emphasizes tools and principles that are equally useful in both sectors. The course looks at the coordination of complex and dynamic systems of people, technology and materials to achieve competitive advantage. A process view of operations is developed and used in order to understand key operational decisions in the management of capacity, cycle time, quality and linkages to other partners in the value chain.
Ability to Drive Results
The courses in this area are about delivering superior performance - in your decision-making, team leadership and negotiations.
ViewHide coursesDesigning Brand Experiences*
The goal of this course is to deepen students’ knowledge of brand and business management by proposing an integrative managerial approach and mind-set to designing brand experiences to better prepare a company to compete in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace. With a fundamental focus on the branded corporation as a value creating system, the course will highlight a strategic approach that will enable students to (1) comprehend how their leadership philosophy and business strategy provide the foundations for designing compelling and distinctive brand experiences (2) understand why building a brand-centric organization is crucial to the implementation and evolution of the desired brand experiences, (3) recognize that the process for designing powerful brand experiences and then continuously improving them over time requires a corporation-wide commitment to profoundly understanding the customers you are choosing to serve, and (4) develop an understanding of the brand experience design challenge, of Design Thinking, and of several important tools in the brand experience design toolbox and the knowledge to apply this methodology and these tools in the business world.
*opt-out possible
Innovating for Social Impact
The purpose of this course is to explore how the tools of business and markets can be used to build innovative and more sustainable solutions to social challenges. Despite the incredible progress in the overall level of human development over the past century, a number of significant such challenges continue to exist in both developed and developing countries, including generational poverty, malnutrition, discrimination, corruption, and climate change. This is a project-based course with a focus on working directly with social enterprises on-site—either within Canada or in a developing/emerging economy—to help design alternative business models for generating and scaling social impact.
International Negotiations
Develops negotiation and dispute resolution skills through simulations set in dyads, groups and multilateral contexts within and between organizations and across cultures. This course focuses on the diagnosis of organizational conflicts and offers strategies for addressing their underlying causes through the development of negotiation skills. Participants engage in and receive feedback on their performance in a variety of experiential exercises, beginning with simple two-party disputes and moving to complex multiparty conflicts. The class is team-taught in order to maximize opportunities for feedback and discussion.
Managerial Decision Analysis
Explores the languages of statistics with a focus on teaching candidates how to become knowledgeable consumers of statistical reports, effective managers of those doing the statistical analysis and confident critics of statistics done poorly.
Three distinct model structures are presented, namely decision theory, regression and forecasting. These methodologies are illustrated with real world problems, and students are given the opportunity to apply them in case settings.
Quantitative Methods for Business
The course is designed to introduce the basic mathematical and statistical skills needed to understand, analyze, and solve various problems encountered in business. The aim of the course is to familiarize participants with basic mathematical tools, such as Differential Calculus as well as basic Statistics by applying them to economic problems and strategic decision making. We will learn how to use Microsoft Excel for calculation, managing large data, and applying advanced applications. Participants will acquire mutually reinforcing skills in mathematics, Statistics, and Excel.
Future Proofing Brands*
While a brand may be profitable today, its future profitability is a function of its ability to respond proactively to evolving customer preferences, changing competitor actions, emerging distribution channels, and disruptive technologies. In this course, you will learn workbench tools that will enable you to identify and address these challenges. Specifically, you will learn how to identify key strategic challenges that face your brand and to develop product and market innovation strategies that will make your brand resilient in the face of these challenges. To “future proof” your brand is to make sure that it thrives in the face of adversity. You will learn how to create such future proof brands in this course.
*opt-out possible
Core Financial Understanding
These courses provide you with an understanding of financial management and increase skills and confidence in making decisions that deliver bottom line results.
ViewHide coursesEconomics of Competition
This course studies the economics of competition within individual industries. The emphasis is on diagnosing the determinants of an industry's structure and formulating a rational, competitive strategy for coping with that structure. Special attention is given to problems of entry, exit, and pricing.
Financial Instruments and Capital Markets
Examines the various types of primary and derivative financial instruments and the markets in which they are traded. A major focus of the course is on becoming familiar with the structure of the instruments, as well as how they can be used to control risk. In addition to the technical and descriptive content, current corporate governance and best practices will be examined through various case studies.
Financial Reporting Systems
Examines the role of financial accounting information from the perspective of users and decision-makers. Emphasis is placed on the choices that the preparers of accounting information make, how these choices affect what is presented to decision-makers and ultimately the decisions they make. Cases are used to emphasize the impact that these choices can have on financial reporting and decisions.
Mergers and Acquisitions
Addresses key strategic and organizational considerations involved in the management of interorganizational relationships. It first explores the motives of individual firms to engage in a merger or pursue an acquisition. The valuation models employed for mergers and acquisitions and the legal aspects of domestic and international linkages are examined and the activities that lead to negotiating and putting together a deal are discussed. And finally, the course addresses the organizational, human resources and operational issues in the management of post-acquisition integration.
Elective courses at the Kellogg School of Management (USA)*
Students in the Kellogg-Schulich EMBA program have the opportunity to take elective courses at the Kellogg School during their second year. These expand your range of curriculum options and allow you to focus more specifically on one key area of business such as finance or strategy. You will be integrated into classes with Kellogg’s own EMBA students, resulting in a powerful business network drawn from across North America. Listed below are examples of courses that have been offered recently.
Advertising Strategy
This course hones critical thinking skills related to the fundamentals of planning and executing advertising strategy. It unfolds along the stages of an advertising campaign including target selection, consumer insight development, formulation of a brand position, and execution and evaluation. At each stage, questions faced by brand managers, advertisers, and marketers are asked and answered. Both classic and contemporary advertising campaigns are used to illustrate core concepts. Discussions focus on skills sets used by brand managers to interact with creative and develop campaigns.
Beyond Diversity: The Fundamentals of Inclusive Leadership
Today's global marketplace is more diverse than ever before - on multiple dimensions. Leaders need specific tools and techniques to effectively understand, lead, and leverage others in these increasingly complex, more diverse organizations and markets. This course blends theoretical and practical, evidence-based insights to provide you with proven strategies and frameworks to successfully harness the power of diversity in organizations and markets.
Biases and Forecasts Under Deep Uncertainty
All critical decisions in business involve bets on future events about which there is no reliable past data or consensus about their likelihoods. Judgment in these situations of deep uncertainty tends to be clouded by behavioral biases that lead to frequent, often disastrous, forecast failures. This course provides frameworks to identify persistent psychological biases that underlie these failures and shows how tools of cognitive psychology and probability can effectively mitigate them.
Creating and Managing Strategic Alliances
This course will enable students to better understand the costs and benefits of strategic alliances (and why such alliances may be preferred over other strategies such as internal development or mergers and acquisitions). In addition, the course covers how to design alliances, and how to avoid the many potential problems and complications in managing these relationships. The course also provides a framework for managing the complex but increasingly common situation in which organizations are involved in multiple alliances.
Entrepreneurial Finance and Venture Capital
Focuses on financing issues facing new, young, high growth business ventures. The course provides the perspective of both the entrepreneur and the investor and is intended for those who are currently or who wish to eventually become entrepreneurs, those who may wish to enter into the venture capital industry or invest in startups as an angel investor, and those who are currently or intend to become employees in startup ventures.
Entrepreneurial Selling
Selling is a life skill. Revenue is a daily pursuit. Whether you manage a multi-national company or are venturing out on your own, you can’t afford to waste time guessing at foundational habits. Starting at the individual level, you will begin activating high-performance habits that allow for immediate implementation and impact. The transformation will continue as you learn what it takes to widen the scope, and shift your mindset, to embed new practices within every client and team-member interaction – driving to objectively positive results.
FinTech Strategy: Innovations in Financial Services
This course uses economic frameworks that both new entrants and conventional financial institutions can use to differentiate the potential gold from the glitter. The course will also assess the viability of partnerships and other win-win strategies conventional financial institutions and new non-financial institutions can employ.
Global Corporate Restructuring
This course has been designed to be at the intersection of three different areas of financial interest including: (a.) Entrepreneurial Finance and the Role of Private Equity; (b.) Family and Closely Held Firms; and, (c.) Corporate Restructuring. The course is by nature an advanced finance elective course that deals with ventures, family businesses, closely-held firms and corporate restructuring transactions both in the U.S. and in an international context. The core question behind the course is: “How family firms and closely-held firms and those who finance them design execute transactions that effectively match opportunities and resources in an international context?” An overreaching insight of the course is that the notions of risk and reward are as important in privately held as in publicly held firms. These notions are also as important in businesses located in the U.S. and internationally where dispersed shareholders are not the norm. The course also involves analysis of corporate restructuring strategies including mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, spin-offs and leveraged buyouts. The course integrates the corporate governance and agency dimensions, financial and strategic management aspects, and legal and accounting considerations into a unified framework for investigating issues in unlocking hidden values for all stakeholders involved, especially the relation between controlling and minority shareholders and their managerial implications.
Human and Machine Intelligence
This course shows how to use a critical set of machine learning decision tools, such as natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and pattern recognition to discover new competitive strategies, turn raw numbers into convincing stories, and make less biased judgments. The overarching goal is to enable you to confidently lead data science and design teams, know the expansiveness and limits of machine-learning complex decision support tools, and be capable of applying human+machine thought partnerships to grow businesses or disrupt Grand Masters in any field.
Incentives, Organization and Strategy
People respond to incentives and they do so in predictable ways. Starting with this simple premise, this course then asks how managers can design incentives to get employees to do what they want them to do. The goal of the course is to offer a micro-economic approach to both the internal organization of firms and its relationship with the firms' overall strategies.
Innovation Strategy & Management
Applies a theoretical and applied approach to understanding Innovation Strategy & Management from the perspective of the senior corporate manager. The course will focus on innovation within business entities, from the typical technology and product innovation programs, to broader process marketing and other forms of innovation. The course will address innovation as a holistic strategic management imperative not limited to Research & Development or New Product Development. While the course will provide a theoretical foundation, the focus will be on real world issues, products and systems.
International Finance
Managing an international business or one exposed to global competition requires an understanding of international financial instruments, markets and institutions. This course seeks to provide students with a working knowledge of these issues. The topics include: the nature of foreign exchange risk, the determination of exchange rates and interest rates, the management of foreign exchange risk with forwards and options, exchange rate forecasting, the evaluation of international investments, currency speculation, the impact of monetary policy on exchange rates, and current developments in the international financial system.
Leadership Development Models and Practices
This course concentrates on how we as leaders in organizations can develop team members to realize their potential. Growing others’ talents helps managers to accomplish the mission and improve their organizations. The course integrates theories and frameworks associated with constructs related to organizations, leadership, and adult development in order to provide you with a more complete understanding of how leaders are nurtured.
Leading High Impact Teams
Integrates the art and science of teamwork to help managers and leaders design and lead high impact teams in their organizations. The course challenges students with engaging exercises and real-world problems and provides opportunities for meaningful and timely feedback on leadership and team performance. This course will focus on managers both as team players and as team leaders.
Leading Organizational Transformation
This course takes the perspective of chief executives who operate at “height and scale.” It explores what management and leadership look and feel like when you oversee 1,000 to 100,000 people and $500M to billions in revenue. How do you lead when you are only one person and you can’t “do” the work of the organization yourself, you can only steer the course of those who do?
To make this perspective concrete, we will start by identifying five growth archetypes commonly found in large organizations.
With this orienting framework in hand, we will study the four key levers that leaders have available to them for shaping and strengthening the large, complex organizations they lead and how these change across the archetypes. These include:
• Building your senior leadership team
• Setting an organizational growth agenda
• Building out strategic communications capabilities
• Understanding and leveraging your own social capital
Strategic Marketing Decisions
The course focuses on two themes: marketing channels and brand management. It analyzes marketing channels from economic, social and political viewpoints. Topics include the management of relationships within and among organizations in a distribution system. Brand positioning and advertising strategies to make a brand successful are covered. Why strong brands play an important role in customer advantage will also be discussed.
Strategies for Growth
“Strategies for Growth” is about effectively scaling a business. Because growth is an imperative for many organizations, it is crucial to understand the strategic fundamentals underpinning profitable growth. Therefore, this course connects frameworks from economics and strategy to the experiences of firms attempting growth initiatives to illustrate why some businesses can scale successfully while others struggle.
Strategy Beyond Markets: Changing the Rules of the Competitive Game
All businesses need to comply with "rules of the game": laws and regulations that structure market competition and a company’s competitive position. Examples include: antitrust legislation; regulatory compliance requirements; privacy regulation and norms; intellectual property rules; product liability rules; barriers to exports; etc. Successful companies excel at reacting to, and influencing, these rules. Disney, for example, successfully lobbied to extend the duration of copyright protection, thus prolonging its exclusive ownership of the Mickey Mouse character. In another example, Monsanto has long been seeking to overcome European Union regulatory barriers to genetically modified crops. Often, success in these "non-market" endeavors is critical for sustaining market competitiveness of a single firm or of a whole industry. In this class, students will learn how to think strategically about the rules of the game, and how to make the rules of the game work for their business.
Visualization for Persuasion
Be persuasive in presenting your ideas. Learn to convince your clients, customers, and colleagues of the merits of your views, using the latest breakthroughs in cognitive science, computer science, and graphic design. This course covers the neuroscience behind the path from understanding to memory, the power of engaging an audience’s visual and motor systems, and the importance of leveraging existing brain networks through stories and metaphors. Through interactive exercises, the course will provide hands-on experience and tools for presenting data-based evidence with impact, across images, graphics, and visualizations of big data. Leave this course with expertise in the principles and cutting-edge methods for effective data visualization, as well as a practical toolkit for conveying your ideas in ways that are convincing, catchy, and contagious.
* Course offerings are subject to change.
Global Electives Modules at Kellogg Partner School Locations*
As a partner in the Kellogg School of Management's global network of executive MBA programs, the Kellogg-Schulich EMBA program offers its students exciting opportunities to study abroad. Through a Global Electives Module at one of the Kellogg partner school locations (Kellogg's Miami campus, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the Guanghua School of Management (China), or the WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management at Vallendar, Germany), students will study and network with other EMBA students in the partnership. In each of the global electives modules, students will take two courses over a ten-day period and be integrated into new multinational study teams.
All global electives modules at the partner schools are scheduled throughout the year to facilitate choice. Every effort is made to accommodate student preferences regarding location.
The Kellogg-Schulich EMBA program also hosts its own global electives module (Schulich International Week). Like all the global electives modules, the Schulich module attracts students from all Kellogg partner schools.
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Year 1
* Course offerings and schedule sequence are subject to change. Students who participate in a Global Electives Module at a Kellogg partner school location are responsible for obtaining the necessary immigration/visa documentation to enter the country of the partner school.
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Year 2