Executive Education

Description 

As a successful manager, you take on increasingly broad responsibilities. This is true of both general managers and managers with strong technical backgrounds who assume roles which call upon more general skills.

Some of these responsibilities are law-sensitive and require decisions likely to attract legal scrutiny. These law-sensitive issues are often fast moving, outside the normal course of business, and carry the possibility of high gains, losses, or both. A manager who can successfully navigate difficult legal waters has a key competence. A manager who triggers legal liability will find it casts a long shadow over a career. And with greater responsibility comes increased personal legal exposure.

Leadership Accountability and the Law provides senior managers like you with the skills needed to effectively manage these risks. Drawn from the curriculum of MIT Sloan, this two-day program is led by the Senior Lecturer with primary responsibility for the law curriculum and who was, for much his professional life, a practicing attorney with a top U.S. law firm.

Through a series of realistic case studies, intensive small- and large-group interactions, exercises, and expert-led discussion, you will gain valuable insights, including:

     • When and how regulatory sanctions are imposed and how savvy 
       managers exercise sound judgment when the risk of criminal
       prosecution is present

     • How to manage the threat of liability in the world’s most litigation-
       prone system

     • How the law balances the rights of employers and employees, 
       especially during sensitive transitions such as corporate
       restructurings, or when a manager who possesses confidential
       information changes jobs

     • What you should know about contracts for complex business 
       transactions and relationships and how they are negotiated
       and administered

The Participants

This is not a program for legal professionals. It is intended to bring a greater understanding of legal issues to senior general and technical executives who make practical strategic decisions about the development, management, or marketing of technology and/or products, or the management of organizations in rapidly-changing markets, including: CEOs, Presidents, COOs, CFOs, Executive VPs, heads of Research & Development, Engineering, Manufacturing & IS, Chief Technologists, Corporate Planners and Strategists, VPs of Marketing & New Venture Development, Supply Chain Management, Human Resources, and other senior managers with business development responsibility.

Faculty

John Akula is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he has primary responsibility for the business law curriculum. He also teaches in the Biomedical Enterprise Program sponsored by MIT Sloan and the Harvard/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.