Executive Education

Description
The 21st century organization is enormously complex and difficult to understand — and even more difficult to manage. A volatile mix of dynamics are triggering changes in the workplace:

• growing international competition
• expanding industry deregulation
• increasing diversity in the workforce
• shrinking product life cycles
• rapidly evolving communication and information technologies

As the complexity increases, effective managers must have a strong knowledge of the people in the organization and the tasks they perform. And they must have the skills to use that knowledge in practical and flexible ways.

The importance of factors such as strategic organizational design, informal networks, leadership styles, negotiation skills, and cultural diagnoses cannot be underestimated. Each has a pivotal impact on an organization's performance.

Leading Change in Complex Organizations presents innovative perspectives on managerial problems and offers practical ways to solve them. The issues examined apply across organizations, national boundaries, and technical domains. Examined in a carefully sequenced schedule of daytime (and sometimes evening) lectures and workshops, program topics include:

• Forces that are transforming traditional management goals and practices
• New perspectives on managerial decision making — what managers can learn from recent studies on information processing, cognitive biases, and individual problem-solving skills
• Improving the quality of decisions made under conditions of ambiguity, uncertainty, and risk
• Techniques designed to insure the success of temporary, problem-focused groups such as task forces and project teams
• Innovative incentives that organizations can offer to attract, retain, and manage employees who do not respond to familiar workplace rewards or aspire to traditional careers
• Critical success factors for implementing technological change in environments where failure rates are commonplace and few technologies seem to be implemented smoothly
• Diagnosing organizational cultures, the role and process of cultural change, and what managers can do to understand and shape that culture

The Participants
Leading Change in Complex Organizations is for general managers and senior functional managers who coordinate diverse groups and groups of diverse individuals. It can also benefit staff executives who manage training and education. Enrollment is limited to maximize interaction with the faculty and discussions within small workshop groups.

Faculty

Faculty Leader: John Van Maanen, Erwin H. Schell Professor of Organizational Studies, researches occupations characterized by dispute, frustration, anger, and ambiguity.

John S. Carroll, Professor of Behavior and Policy Sciences, researches individual and group decision-making in organizational and legal settings.

Edgar H. Schein, Professor Emeritus of Management, is a leader in the field of organizational culture, process consultation, career dynamics, organizational learning and change. He works with individuals and companies to better align their needs and identifies what makes some firms innovative and adaptive and others not.

Peter Senge, Senior Lecturer and Chairman of the Society for Organizational Learning, studies how firms and other organizations can develop learning capabilities in a world of increasing complexity and rapid change. A founding member of the Society for Organizational Learning, Senge has written the widely acclaimed book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization (1990).

John D. Sterman, Standish Professor of Management, specializes in systems thinking for corporate and public policy, behavioral decision theory, nonlinear dynamics, and economic dynamics. His widely-used management flight simulators allow people to experience the opportunities and challenges facing top management.