The objective is to know and understand the significant events and issues that affect the business of running an organization. To discover and understand the human processes that are essential for developing leadership and management skills. The course comprises two parts:

• a) An experiential programme whereby students will participate in structured outdoor exercises to develop problem-solving, team building, leadership and communication skills.
• b) A residential course with an integrative approach to understand the complexities of leading and managing a business organization in the new millennium.

Family business is a puzzling topic that fascinates academics, investors, and managers. These businesses are ridiculed, especially in Hong Kong, as unprofessional and cronyism-driven. But one cannot ignore their importance: families started many of the most successful firms in the world; families owned the majority of listed firms; many family firms uphold the best innovation, quality and brand value; and family funds constitute some largest philanthropic and investment projects. This course takes a family enterprising approach to discuss the importance, diversity, complexity, and more importantly continuous entrepreneurship of business family (as opposed to family business). Apart from lectures and case analysis, students should interact with family members and associated professionals to understand the types, life cycle, conflict, succession, characteristics of business families. For sustaining their growth, practical approaches, such as structures and procedures as advisory boards, family councils, family venture funds and spin-offs, and family philanthropy, will also be discussed. This course shall benefit family business members, managers in family-owned firms, and professionals.

It’s an era of “Technology Everywhere”. The rapid advancement in technology literally impacts every sector of our society. From taxi services to mobile payment, from robotic engineering to artificial intelligence; new innovations and technology have laid substantial or even subversive changes to our ways of doing business. It is, therefore, important for senior management to understand the uncertainty and challenges engendered by technological and market changes, and with a better understanding, be able to derive the optimal ways to cope with these changes.

This course is designed to illustrate how to devise a good market plan comprising segmentation, positioning and targeting to achieve consumer satisfaction. Emphasis is placed on adopting the basic marketing concept to enhance a firm’s long-run market position via the creation of a differential advantage while meeting consumer desires at the same time. Another emphasis of this course is to explain how a firm can excel in the ever-changing market and competitive environment.

This course integrates areas within financial management and investments to analyse merger and acquisition (takeover) markets. The class will be conducted using both lectures and presentations. The topics covered in lectures include an overview of takeover markets, legal aspects and restrictions, capital budgeting techniques, the efficient market hypothesis, the market model and computation of abnormal returns, the dividend discount model and the free cash flow model. The topics covered in presentations will include US and Hong Kong cases of mergers, tender offers and leveraged buyouts. Amongst other things, the efficient market hypothesis is applied to analyse the stock market response to takeover announcement as well as a range of other issues including: welfare gains/losses associated with takeover, the cost of capital for due acquiror and the intrinsic value of the target (using dividend discount and free cashflow models).

This course is designed to hone students’ entrepreneurial skills. To that end, each student will work in a group to develop a business plan and to devise a means for acquiring capital for a new venture. The instructors will lecture on various aspects of planning and financing start-ups, and guest speakers – entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and incubator sponsors – will describe their experience of dealing with start-ups. Students will succeed in this course only if they take the initiative to produce viable plans. The instructors are coaches and facilitators to help course participants. Students, together with the instructors, will critically assess each of the business plans.

Efficient and effective operations enable firms to gain a competitive advantage by creating cost leadership, quality superiority, and capability of meeting customer demands quickly. This course will introduce concepts, issues, tools, and techniques in designing, managing and improving business processes. Topics encompass: operations strategy, process analysis, quality management, and supply chain management, etc. Cases and business best practices will be discussed in the course to demonstrate that companies can use (and have used) the principles from this course to significantly enhance their competitiveness.

Success in business needs strategies. The advances of information technology have given business strategies a new dimension: building computer-mediated networks to facilitate transactions over e-platforms. The examples include Amazon, Google, Spotify, iTunes, Alibaba, Uber, Airbnb, and many other B2B, B2C, and C2C platforms. The eplatform business has network effect following demand-side scale economies that sees the value of a product from the willingness-to-pay of customers. This creates new perspectives of business strategies on pricing, platform products, envelopment attacks, winner-takes-all effect, and cannibalization. This course discusses how to run a successful business with e-platforms.

This course is designed to help students understand the role of China in the Global Economy. We will review the reforms and the current state of the Chinese economy and its financial markets. Major topics such as the Belt and Road Initiative, The Bay Area, Sino-US trade war, China and ASEAN, Islamic Finance will be covered. We will also study the development of e-payment the green economy in China.

[To be confirmed]

(Students are responsible for visas arrangement, if required. Students will need to pay for their own airfare, meals, accommodation and miscellaneous expenses.)