Course Structure

This course will be taught in a studio format. That is, while we will have a limited amount of traditional lecture and class discussion, much of the learning will be accomplished by doing. Students will be assigned to teams and will work as project managers on real projects. A significance amount of class time will be dedicated to applying concepts introduced in class to these projects and discussing progress students are making with these projects. Students will need to commit to a significant amount of time outside the classroom, working with their teams and managing their projects.

Class Discussion

In addition to completing your required reading and viewing the assigned videos, each week you will spend some time on the Internet doing some research and learning about additional topics that are not covered by your textbooks. Please come to class prepared to answer and discuss all of the topics listed under “Web Research” in the class schedule.

Change Leadership

Regardless of the value of the systems you create, you will always find that one of the most difficult jobs of a change agent is influencing the behavior of people. People, by their nature, resist change. In most weeks we will have a class which focuses on change leadership and discuss strategies for driving change in organizations. For these classes, all discussion will be led by student teams.

For each one of these classes, a handful of short readings will be assigned from the Kotter text book. For each change leadership class meeting, students will prepare a brief PowerPoint presentation (2-5 slides) for their three favorite short stories. The first slide will “tell the story”. The following slides will include key lessons learned the reader should take away from the case. Students will be selected at random to lead the class discussion on one of these short stories and will use this slide deck to add structure to their discussion.