Core Leadership Courses

E295 Communications for Engineering Leaders is a required year-long course. In the Fall, our objective is to develop and hone your individual communication skills. You will be able to choose kinds instructional content most useful for developing your communicative competencies. In the Spring, our objective is to develop and/or hone your team communication skills. You will enroll as a capstone team.

During the course of the year, you will investigate how you can leverage various kinds of media, rhetoric, and discourse to connect with a variety of stakeholders crucial to your success: engineers and scientists, entrepreneurs and funders, public intellectuals and trendsetters. You will find support as you become a critical reader of industry and marketing reports, a keen observer of current events, and an author of original market, industry, and IP research. You will also be inspired to develop your visual, auditory, vocal, and kinesthetic skills; to find effective ways to describe and explain your work; and to connect with your audience and your project on an emotional, social, and intellectual level. By the end of the year, you’ll be able to use a variety of communicative forms, genres, and strategies to creatively discuss your career and capstone trajectories.

Negotiation skills are critical for leaders in technology and scientific fields to have their solutions accepted and implemented. This bootcamp course is designed to provide students the opportunity to hone in on these skills by examining and engaging in case studies, surveys, and in-class exercises. Exercises may include: best/worst negotiation practices, exploring conflict attitudes, and approaches to influencing and persuading.

With the goal of preparing students to enter industry, this bootcamp course will expose students to a wide variety of managerial approaches, technologies, personalities, and business models. With a heavy emphasis on case discussions, 270B will require students to interact and contribute to discussions. Topics include technology management, Intellectual Property basics and strategy, ethics, and leadership. Cases may include: “Sheila Mason & Craig Shepherd Intellectual Property and Strategy”, “A Letter from Prison”, and “Antegren, A Beacon of Hope.”

In this required semester-long course, students will work on practical assignments with their Capstone teams to learn about managing their capstone deliverables and how to become a high performing team. Topics may include: effective team processes, conflict resolution, and teaming as an executive.

Getting a job is one option after you graduate. Or you can become a job-giver. Entrepreneurs see opportunities when others see obstacles. They find a way to inspire others to join them using their vision, passion as their currency. This course is all about learning that entrepreneurial mindset. This course is about learning the mindset of entrepreneurs, their method, their struggles and their successes.

This bootcamp course will delve into themes related to entrepreneurship. Via the case discussion method, students gain exposure to a wide variety of scenarios and decisions faced by an entrepreneur interested in starting a scalable business. Topics will range from opportunity identification and market segmentation to sales strategy and entrepreneurial finance. Cases may include: “Documentum Inc.,” “Vermeer A,” and “Qualtrics: Bootstrapping Growth.”

If you think marketing is advertising or click-bait or tomorrow’s sale, you’re missing why it’s the powerful difference between companies that succeed and fail. Whatever your future career, if you understand marketing, you’ll be better at it. The real-world market tests you run make you practice the same agile discovery methods you’ll do in a “real” job. From creativity, to marketing fundamentals to what modern marketing and product management really looks like, we’ll cover what’s most important for you to understand about marketing.

In this bootcamp course, students will gain exposure to a wide variety of product and marketing approaches, technologies, and business models. Students will be required to employ multidisciplinary analysis while dissecting case studies, in-class projects, and running “lean startup” methodology market tests of their own. Class discussions will focus on issues raised by examining companies and their product and marketing examples, including analysis, brainstorming, diagnosis, and recommendations. Projects include market tests, creating product personas, and constructing go-to-market plans.

As an engineer it is not part of your degree program to make you an expert in finance and accounting, but it is necessary to assess whether the earnings from a project will satisfy investors sufficiently to obtain the capital to build the project. In this class, you will learn how to assess whether the earnings potential of a project will make it the type of project in which people will invest. The expression of engineering projects in a financial context gives investors a greater level of comfort when considering your project and also when considering the capabilities of the engineering team who will undertake the project.

The course has been designed so that the median student will spend 3- 6 hours per day studying finance outside of class. Those of you with a strong background in finance and accounting will spend less time and find the majority of the material straightforward. Those of you with less or no background in finance and accounting will spend more time and will probably find some of the material quite difficult. Please bear this in mind when selecting this course – it is not a beginner’s introduction to finance and accounting. Time will be spent doing problem sets, reviewing lecture notes, doing practice problems, reading the assigned readings and news articles.

In addition to teaching how to assess the economic viability of your engineering projects, the goal of this class is also instructing how investment decision techniques can be used in engineering. Whenever possible, the latest developments going on in the broader FinTech and TechFin space will be highlighted throughout the course.

This bootcamp course is designed to introduce students to accounting and finance, including the concepts and techniques necessary to analyze and implement optimal investment decisions by firms. Topics include basic discounting techniques, and capital budgeting under certainty and uncertainty, asset pricing models. This course will combine the theoretical underpinnings of finance with some “real world” examples. Deliverables include problem sets and a final exam.

Why have many of the world’s most valuable firms been founded since 2000? How did the founders of these firms get so rich so quickly? How did they scale so fast and with so little investment? Will their dominance survive? How can you start a platform firm?

Technology Strategy explores the road to riches for Google, Amazon, Facebook, AirBnB, and other platform firms. We begin by looking at Tesla, a modern platform firm – or not? We identify the types of network effects that lead to insurmountable barriers to entry and strategic dominance, and look at how Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others initiated and scaled their platforms and built such barriers. We go (virtually) overseas and consider Tencent, and discuss a Fung written and multi-media case on Uber in the city of Austin, Texas. We will break into teams that will each choose and present explanations of newer platforms and their strategies. We finish up by looking at the implications of the data that these platforms collect – the new business models they enable – and how new data regulations like the GDPR will impact those models.

Industry analysis helps engineering leaders gauge the prospects of firms in certain lines of business. It’s particularly useful with new industries, where historic financial results are nonexistent; and in changing industries, where past firm performance is not a reliable indicator of what’s to come. In this course students will master tools of industry analysis, including the five forces model, market growth, industry value chain, disruptive innovation, and economic moat. By the conclusion of the course students will be able to assess and describe the future performance of innovative ventures with accuracy and confidence.

The course has two objectives. The first is to develop team skills: talent management, conflict resolution, and leadership. The second is to develop foundations of project management: goal-setting and role definition, assessment and improvement, and stakeholder management.

The objective of this course is to provide Master of Engineering and Master of Translational Medicine students with insights into the type of leadership skills required to be a successful cross-cultural leader in today’s increasingly complex global marketplace. The goal is for each student to develop a personalized global leadership”toolkit” that they will be able to utilize as their professional careers unfold.

There will be a specific focus on how to deploy that “toolkit” to assist with business decision making in the fiduciary context. Over the course of this intensive boot camp, students will be required to employ technical abilities and multidisciplinary analysis while examining and engaging in case studies, simulations, and in-class exercises in order to achieve some key course goals:

• Develop a global mindset
• Become more interculturally competent
• Learn to lead people from different cultures
• Understand the implications of global leadership

You are putting in a late night at work when you find a document in a conference room which appears to contradict recent information released publicly at your company. Do you have to report it? To who? What if you don’t? You are at a company picnic when you overhear senior company officials talk about positive revenue numbers. Can you use this information to purchase company stock? Does it matter if the information is publicly available? Can you tell a friend? And what if your friend trades on the information but you don’t? You are traveling in a foreign country on company business when a relative who lives there asks you to take him out to dinner. Are you allowed to do this?  What if the relative is a government official in that country? Does it matter? If so, what if you use personal funds instead of the company credit card?

Professional Ethics In Technology, Law & Business explores these questions, by using real life examples to see how others have navigated similar situations.  A seasoned attorney with US government, regulatory, private and in-house experience will lead the course.  We will begin on a more personal level by exploring how we as job applicants present ourselves on our resumes and on social media, and ethical considerations to keep in mind as we market ourselves.  The course will then look at company whistle-blowers, insider trading, and potential landmines when doing business in foreign countries, among other timely topics.   We will also have a senior legal officer from a global technology company visit the class to provide her perspective on these topics, and to address ethical trends in the technology industry.  The primary goal of the course is to engage the class in a robust discussion in a respectful and non-judgmental manner on how we would act if placed in similar situations.

Designed for MEng and MTM students. This 1 unit elective provides an in-depth look at the discipline and function of innovation management. The class begins by answering the questions, “What is innovation, innovation management, and how does it differ from product management”. Modules then cover setting an innovation strategy, building support structures inside firms, managing innovation pipelines and processes, and creating a holistic innovation culture. Last, students will get an in-depth look at a “day in the life” of an innovation manager and finish with a class project.

This course is designed to provide Masters of Engineering and Masters of Translational Medicine students the opportunity to develop their skills and confidence in power and influence dynamics. It can help change how you see the world and move through it. Future leaders in technology and scientific fields will learn to avoid over-reliance on rational persuasion and apply power dynamics skillfully.

Engineering efforts in a globalized, multicultural world require a variety of techniques to effectively lead diverse teams. This course examines Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) goals, best practices, and strategies of today’s inclusive leaders. Through professional interactions, examination of current research, and understanding the competitive advantage of DEI initiatives, students will be prepared to successfully lead in diverse engineering environments.

An understanding of the role of Product Manager, and the core skills and frameworks that are the basis of good product practices are important for anyone who wants to build great products that address customer needs and drive true business value. In this highly interactive course, you’ll learn about the product development lifecycle & what makes a good product manager. You’ll also dig into tactics and core product skills such as building hypothesis & impactful problem statements, conducting effective user interviews, financial modeling/business case development, building a roadmap & backlog, slicing scope for iterative development, prioritization, storytelling, and user journey mapping using real world examples & hands on practice.