Strategy

This course introduces students to the theoretical concepts and analytical tools required for formulating and implementing appropriate strategies that affect the enduring success of the entire organization. Topics covered include external and internal environmental analyses, business-level strategies, corporate-level strategies, strategy process and implementation, and special topics such as competitive dynamics and competition in high tech industries. This course emphasizes the application of theory to the real world strategic issues. Students are encouraged to synthesize knowledge from other courses into a comprehensive understanding of competitive advantage.

Digital Media

From Wikipedia, to YouTube, Twitter, Xanga, Facebook, Baidu, Cyworld, and the iPhone, digital media is rapidly changing Asian marketplaces. This course prepares business leaders for the challenges they face as they adopt digital media. It will provide a comparison and contrast of Asia’s digital markets.  Students will study social media in the larger social and theoretical issues framing digital media across Asia such as the wisdom of crowds, social network theory, digital literacy, and different demands for transparency and Internet regulation.

Leadership

This course will provide students with conceptual frameworks for increasing individual, team and organisational performance. Topics include: understanding the dimensions along which individuals differ, identifying the key principles that foster high individual performance, learning when to structure work using teams, recognizing common pitfalls associated with working in teams. The course introduces students to frameworks that are useful for diagnosing organizational performance and helps them learn how to exercise leadership through organizational culture, organizational design, organizational congruence, and effective change management.

Crisis Management

Crises are ill-structured situations that pose a special challenge to organizations.  Often, a crisis involves an overt emergency situation that can be identified by the organization’s management and addressed appropriately.  But there are often more serious underlying threats that the management fails to recognize and effectively address, which escalate to become the crisis.  Crisis management gives participants broad exposure to the key theoretical and operational concepts relevant to leading an Asian organization to become crisis-prepared. Through discussions, case studies and simulations, participants will develop skills in crisis management planning, response and communication, shaped specifically for organizations operating in the Asia Pacific region.

Public Sector Influence

The single most challenging communication task in public life is persuasion, influencing others to understand, accept, and act on an often divergent viewpoint. This course introduces you to the essentials of such effective influence and asks some key questions about a complex and fascinating process: What makes some people so influential? What appeals to listeners: logic or emotion? How can I tell when someone is trying to deceive me? Why are some people especially susceptible to persuasive attempts? How do mass influence conditions, like public policy campaigns, differ from how one gains compliance from individuals? By discovering what is known in the last 50 years of research about persuasion, students will engage in applying persuasion concepts and strategies to public sector communication.

Investor Relations

Investor Relations introduces students to the essentials of effective communication of a company's investment story and to relationship building with the investment community and capital markets. This course firstly provides an overview of Listing Rules and Codes of Corporate Governance in Asian markets. Secondly, students will be equipped to handle the operational paradox of investor relations: on the one hand, companies are competing for business and need to be sensitive to competitive threats and giving too much information away to the market. On the other hand, companies are competing for capital and need to attract and meet the needs of the investment community.

Risk Communication                                                       

In a world where public confidence in the ability of corporations and governments to manage health, food and environmental risks is declining, risk communication can help organizations to anticipate issues, foster dialogue and understanding, and resolve disputes before they lead to an irreversible loss of social trust.

This course will examine the scientific foundations for risk communication and management. Featuring risk perception theories, case studies and practical tools, this course will help students develop effective, theory-based risk communication and management strategies.

Global Public Relations

Public relations is quickly becoming as global as its two points of reference, i.e. business and media. However, its practitioners are practically always educated in a local, at best regional tradition and only later adapt to trans-local and multi-market challenges. This course firstly provides them with all the available models and data on trans-continental public relations; it secondly develops a comparative perspective and investigates the fundamentally different paradigms of public relations in Asia, Europe and the United States; it thirdly instructs how to integrate this body of research from the social sciences into managerial and professional practice.

Internal Communication

This course uses systems-theory to investigate how formal and informal as well as leadership-, team-, and interpersonal communication enable goal-attainment and secure the adaptability of a company. Rather than assuming employees to be the audiences of organizational communication, this course introduces them as the originators of frames and meaning. It goes on to explore how management and employees can be coached by communication professionals to co-create their companies’ identity.

Global Journalism

The goal of this course is to explore the emergence of globalised communication in the context of the IT revolution, economic globalization and the changing international system. The effects of globalised communication on societies and various publics will be explored. Particular emphasis will be directed to the elaboration of a conceptual framework for analyzing the political and normative causes and consequences of these developments. Another focus will be on significant changes in cultural communication (international, intercultural and global communication) as well as media systems and journalism, new communication platforms like Social Networking Sites and the necessity of implementing a new understanding of e-literacy to cope with professional communication requirements in corporations and organizations.