Full-time MBA

Build an intuitive understanding of how everyday financial decisions work and learn the fundamental tools to make them.

This skills-based module will help you to think critically, gaining an understanding of the information a finance manager may need, how they think and make decisions, and how they work with other finance professionals. This module will be useful for you, whatever your job role or function, as you will learn how to respond to common problems universally faced by financial managers and those working with them.

We will not focus on formulae or algorithms, instead placing emphasis on the practical application of tools and concepts that can be used in a variety of contexts. Real-life applications and examples cover every area of business, from marketing to consulting, biotech to entrepreneurship, and beyond.

You’ll leave this module with a ‘finance mindset’, viewing finance as a measuring rod for all aspects of a business, with value creation as your ultimate aim.

Themes at a glance:

• Time value of money
• Bond valuation, stock valuation and equity multiples
• Financial securities used by corporations
• Risk and return tradeoff
• Diversification
• Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM)
• Market efficiency
• Capital structure and weighted average cost of capital (WACC)
• Valuation and capital budgeting.

This module will introduce you to the main conceptual frameworks that have shaped research and practice on innovation and strategic entrepreneurship. The key themes you will cover are the link between innovation and strategy, innovation and organisational structure and the role of ‘openness’ in successful innovation, enabling you to develop an integrated view of innovation and corporate entrepreneurship in different operating contexts.

Through a series of experiential workshops, lectures, seminars and case studies, the LeadershipPlus module enables you to reflect on what you personally stand for while preparing you to lead, manage and influence other people successfully in today’s complex, cross-border, multicultural environment.

Workshops will flow from introspection about self, to consideration of the leadership stereotype, moving through to a team leadership perspective focusing on the importance of dialogue. You’ll then focus on being a responsible leader, considering ethics and emotion regulation, before digging into leadership of large-scale change in organisations and the role of the collective.

As part of this experience, you will have the opportunity to apply and develop your leadership skills within a live business context. As part of a group you will undertake a client project with a corporate, SME or not-for-profit organisation, investigating a current business issue and presenting practical recommendations to the problem posed.

Your LeadershipPlus experience is a personal change journey that underpins the rest of your MBA, ensuring you continue to develop confidence and the ability to achieve your career ambitions whilst driving positive change as a leader.

Discover more about our LeadershipPlus offering

Become a skilled user of financial information, using your knowledge to make the most efficient and successful financial decisions.

You’ll be introduced to the key techniques within management accounting and corporate reporting, building your financial literacy in a management context. This module will enable you to understand and interpret financial and other corporate information, enter into intelligent discussion with financial partners, and use this information to improve your organisation’s fundamentals.

Whilst there will be some calculations, we’ll delve into issues around the numbers and their context, with hands-on, practical analysis. On completion of this module you should be able to apply these tools and concepts to your own organisation, and understand where and how the decisions and actions you take are represented within your organisation’s key financial statements.

Themes at a glance:

• Understanding, analysing, and interpreting financial statements
• Measuring and reporting performance and position
• Relationships between cash flow and earnings
• Costing systems
• Cost information for decision making
• Performance evaluation
• Current issues in accounting.

Gain a broad introduction to the marketing concept and the role of marketing in the modern organisation. Examine the role of marketing in today's increasingly competitive, dynamic, and turbulent management environment. Explore the core themes addressed by marketing-oriented organisations, whether they are commercially focused or not-for-profit.

Operations are pervasive. This module hinges on the fact that everyone is an operations manager; if you manage resources and/or produce goods or services, you are managing operations. Whether you’re managing the ‘traditional operation’ in manufacturing or service operations, logistics, sales in a smaller firm, or risk in a financial firm, the principles of operations are key to driving better performance. In this module you’ll learn the basic principles of operations management, applying them to a range of organisations (public and private) before taking this logic and employing it in your own complex and unique work situation.

The module begins with understanding how operations deliver the organisational promise – how does it link to the organisational strategy… and how can it inform the organisational strategy? Who are your customers and what are their expectations? Based on this understanding, how do you design operations, the underlying processes, and the customer experience, in such a way as to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction while making excellent use of resources?

As the module progresses, we look at how we manage capacity of the operation, how we can measure performance, and what we understand by quality. The module concludes by considering how operations can be improved, and the role of Lean Thinking, providing you with a raft of improvement tools that you can apply to your own organisations.

Social and environmental sustainability is embedded within this module, ensuring that you leave as a manager of operations who is able to face this contemporary challenge head-on.

Themes at a glance:

• The operations landscape, linking operations to the wider organisation
• Customer objectives and operations strategy
• Process design, configuration and flow
• Matching supply and demand
• Managing quality and customer satisfaction
• Lean thinking
• Application of process improvement tools and techniques

Understand what an organisation is, what it is made up of, and how you can shape it to improve performance.

This module will explore the links between organisational sociology, organisational psychology, and management science, training you to understand and analyse the relationship between individuals, groups and teams, and the organisational context they work within.

You’ll cover key theories and frameworks, appropriate to a range of organisational contexts, and learn to apply them in practice. We’ll apply these theories to the areas that are important to your organisations now, discussing contemporary challenges. These could include topics as wide-ranging as hybrid working and its impact in motivation, team dynamics, and power networks. You’ll consider the organisation from different perspectives: structural, HR, political, and symbolic. These perspectives will widen your view, exposing you to different ways of thinking that can be taken forward into your other modules, and your own role.

Themes at a glance:

• What is organisational behaviour? Key concepts, approaches, and implications
• Motivation
• Groups and teams
• Organisational structure
• Organisational culture
• Power and organisational politics
• Decision Making
• Ethics.

Learn to adopt a critical and innovative perspective on the general management dilemmas faced by executives in modern organisations. The module will give you a new, distinctive and compelling approach to management decision-making.

Strategy is fundamentally concerned with managing the long-term direction of a whole business. This module sets out to understand the difference between strategy at the level of the individual business (or business unit) and at the corporate level. To do this, the module outlines the basic analytical concepts, frameworks and methods used in setting a company's long-term direction. It is distinctive in three ways:

• The way it draws on concepts and techniques from multiple disciplines.
• The way it views strategy from the perspective of strategic decision-making.
• The way it combines the analytic foundations for making strategic decisions with the responsibility of general managers to orchestrate the resources of the business to achieve sustained, superior performance. This module helps in this endeavour by providing an integrated approach to business within which one can see the overall strategic intent. It helps students to understand how strategic decisions can define the changes a company seeks to make to themselves and their market.

Themes at a glance:

• What is strategy?
• Environment/industry analysis
• Strategic positioning
• Competing on resources and capabilities
• Diversification/Internationalisation
• Competitive analysis
• Strategic alliances/coopetition
• Strategy and technology

Example modules:

• Corporate Finance
• Mergers and Acquisitions

Example modules:

• Leading and Managing Change

• Leading Organisations: Performance, Stakeholders and Governance

• Behavioural Sciences for the Manager

• Negotiation Theory and Practice

Example modules:

• Managing Sustainable Energy Transitions
• Leading and Harnessing Diversity

Example modules:

• Digital Transformation

Example modules:

• Strategic Marketing

Example modules:

• Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation
• Entrepreneurial Finance

Example modules:

• Strategy and Practice

Example modules:

• International Business

Example modules:

• Digital Economy, Aalto University School of Business, Finland
• Mastering Conscious Capitalism and Social Innovation, Nova School of Business and Economics, Portugal.

Please note that international elective modules offered on the Full-time MBA do vary year-on-year.