The summer of 2020 has brought issues of equity and race to the forefront of society. How do we create tolerant and just climates at work? Changing the culture of an organization is challenging in the best of circumstances; today, it can seem impossible. Yet, it is more necessary and urgent than ever to address these issues thoughtfully and with effective practices that can produce real change. Six Darden professors have designed this teach-out to bring you the latest scholarship and best practices on diversity, equity and inclusion and organizational change. You'll learn how to identify and counteract inequity in organizations, how to build the business case for diversity and inclusion, and how managers can constructively address inequity. You'll also learn how to promote the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion at work, how to have difficult conversations, and how to manage and lead change.

This course introduces students to the science of business analytics while casting a keen eye toward the artful use of numbers found in the digital space. The goal is to provide businesses and managers with the foundation needed to apply data analytics to real-world challenges they confront daily in their professional lives. Students will learn to identify the ideal analytic tool for their specific needs; understand valid and reliable ways to collect, analyze, and visualize data; and utilize data in decision making for their agencies, organizations or clients.

Learn how fashion and luxury companies work and understand their brands, products, retail, and communication strategies. Travel through business models, international development, and product categories with industry influent experts. Adopting a case-study approach, the course presents strategic brand management in luxury and fashion companies as a balancing act: tradition vs. innovation, expertise vs. experimentation, casual vs. stylish; in order to increase the brand value by nurturing the brand heritage and at the same time staying fresh, relevant, and contemporary in the global marketplace. Topics such as the impact of new retail channels, new media channels, and new business declinations for the brand and emerging markets will be discussed in the course.

The third course in this Specialization introduces you to the factors that influence how effective boards of directors will be in carrying out their roles and responsibilities and hence the impact they have in shaping the success of the organization they govern. While this course has been developed with North American culture in mind, we do appreciate that, in other parts of the world, the nature of the factors that influence the effectiveness of nonprofit boards of directors may vary. Nevertheless,it is our hope that much of the course content will still be of value to those in other parts of the world. To learn more about this course, please watch the overview video by copying and pasting the following link into your web browser: https://goo.gl/aAMIfl. Keywords: Nonprofit; Nonprofit Sector; Voluntary Sector; Nonprofit Organizations, Non-Governmental Organizations, Volunteer Organizations, Leadership, Management, Governance, Board, Board of Directors, Performance, Effectiveness Course 3 Overview: Week 1: This week's questions: What factors influence the effectiveness of board meetings? What are the formal procedures and structures within the board that impact its performance? What can a board do to intentionally improve the way it structures itself and runs its decision making meetings? Week 2: This week's questions: What do we mean by board composition and development and why is it important? Why is it difficult to change the composition of the board? How do you design the ideal mix of board members? How do you locate, recruit and develop board members? Week 3: This week's questions: What do we mean by the "culture" of the board and why is it important? How do boards develop and pass along culture? Can board cultures be intentionally changed? What is the role of leadership in shaping board culture? What do effective nonprofit leaders involved in governance do? How can leadership be managed for higher performance? Week 4: At this stage, you are asked to review the course content, submit a written assignment (known lightheartedly as a BEAR (Board Effectiveness Readiness Assessment), and take two multiple choice Readiness Assurance Tests (known similarly as RATs). One RAT will assess knowledge and reading comprehension and the other will test application of knowledge within a practical case. Week 5: We will encourage you to discuss the RATs in the discussion forums and take them again should you wish to change any of your answers based on the information exchanged.

Businesses run on data, and data offers little value without analytics. The ability to process data to make predictions about the behavior of individuals or markets, to diagnose systems or situations, or to prescribe actions for people or processes drives business today. Increasingly many businesses are striving to become “data-driven”, proactively relying more on cold hard information and sophisticated algorithms than upon the gut instinct or slow reactions of humans. This course will focus on understanding key analytics concepts and the breadth of analytic possibilities. Together, the class will explore dozens of real-world analytics problems and solutions across most major industries and business functions. The course will also touch on analytic technologies, architectures, and roles from business intelligence to data science, and from data warehouses to data lakes. And the course will wrap up with a discussion of analytics trends and futures.

This course will help you to navigate ambiguity in definitions of "Smart City". You can review successful cases and practices of different approaches to transformation management, determine the potential of your city in the digital transformation, as well as find useful practical advices on search for funding of various digital projects in your city. In addition, lecturers introduce you with formation of Smart City structure and infrastructure from the officials’ point of view. If you are already an expert in the field of Smart Cities, the course will give you the opportunity to assess your strengths and to improve knowledge in this field. You will gain additional skills in managing digital transformation programs with real examples, as well as you will be acquainted with communication methods and marketing of government projects.

We will analyze the pros and cons of creating a single or multiple Esport organization and recommend an effective branding strategy for a hypothetical Esport organization based on current Esport branding considerations. You will develop a plan for recruiting funding resources for a hypothetical Esports organization and choose an Esport organization role of interest, other than Owner, and describe your reasoning.

This course focuses on understanding subsistence marketplaces and designing business solutions for the billions of people living in poverty in the global marketplace. To develop understanding of subsistence marketplaces, we use exercises to enable participants to view the world from the eyes of subsistence consumers and entrepreneurs, facilitate bottom‐up understanding generated by participants, and provide insights from extensive research. More broadly, the course uses the context of extreme resource constrained contexts to learn about the bottom-up approach pioneered through the Subsistence Marketplaces Initiative, and apply it in any context. The course will involve virtual immersion in subsistence contexts, emersion of unique insights, bottom-up design, innovation and enterprise. A parallel project will focus on understanding a specific need in a subsistence marketplace, and designing a solution and an enterprise plan. Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to: • Develop an understanding of subsistence marketplaces • Design solutions for subsistence marketplaces • Develop enterprise plans to implement solutions for subsistence marketplaces • Apply the bottom-up approach for subsistence marketplaces as well as other contexts This course is part of the iMBA offered by the University of Illinois, a flexible, fully-accredited online MBA at an incredibly competitive price. For more information, please see the Resource page in this course and onlinemba.illinois.edu.

The purpose of this course is to help individuals and organizations survive when confronted with disruptive technologies that threaten their current way of life. We will look at a general model of survival and use it to analyze companies and industries that have failed or are close to failing. Examples of companies that have not survived include Kodak, a firm over 100 years old, Blockbuster and Borders. It is likely that each of us has done business with all of these firms, and today Kodak and Blockbuster are in bankruptcy and Borders has been liquidated. Disruptions are impacting industries like education; Coursera and others offering these massive open online courses are a challenge for Universities. In addition to firms that have failed, we will look at some that have survived and are doing well. What are their strategies for survival? By highlighting the reasons for the decline of firms and industries, participants can begin to understand how to keep the same thing from happening to them. Through the study of successful organizations, we will try to tease out approaches to disruptions that actually work. Our ultimate objective is to develop a strategy for survival in a world confronting one disruptive technology after another.

Welcome! This course provides participants with the opportunity to explore the multifaceted concept of international development in order to be able to interpret and lead its challenges, opportunities and constant evolutions. Starting from an in-depth analysis of the current international development architecture, its key actors and trends, the course then illustrates the main international organizations' governance systems; identifies their funding and financing tools necessary to implement development programs and achieve sustainable development goals; and explains how to effectively leverage on human capital to drive organizational success and be ‘fit for purpose’ in an ever changing international development scenario. The course is delivered by both Bocconi University and SDA Bocconi School of Management faculty involved in programs as the EMMIO - Executive Master in Management of International Organizations. The course also provides participants with the opportunity to learn from the experience of senior professionals serving International Organizations at all levels.