Managing a company in the food and beverage industry is a fascinating task. Food and beverage products are so deeply rooted in the culture of most countries that making and selling them is not only a matter of making and selling good and tasty products, but products that nurture people's body, soul, and heart. Given this, it's not difficult to see that the task quickly becomes complex. The objective of this course is twofold: first, we will focus on contemporary challenges that managers and entrepreneurs in food and beverage businesses should be able to face; and second, we will provide models and tools to design and implement appropriate courses of action to satisfy customers and build an advantage over the competition. This course is made up of four modules and an introduction, each exploring one dilemma that food and beverage companies face. You will be presented with a set of video lectures and guest speakers. These lectures combine an accessible introduction to specific topics integrated with interviews of managers and experts that will give precious insights and examples to the participants. To enhance your learning experience with us, we will make a Documentary on the Excellences of the Modena District available for you, which is in a format that we have developed specifically for this course in order to give you the chance to experience first-hand the territory as our on-campus students usually do. Each module is paired with an evaluated quiz and weekly discussion forums to reflect on the variety of the F&B world, its complexity, and the power of the network that we will build together during the course. Successful completion of the quizzes is required for a course certificate as explained in the Grading Policy. Below the guest speakers of the course: Masterchef Italia Sky – Nils Hartmann, Head of Movie Channels at Sky Italia – www.masterchef.sky.it Eataly - Paolo Bongiovanni, Marketing Director Italy – www.eataly.net Berlucchi – Paolo Ziliani, Owner – www.berlucchi.it Joia Restaurant – Alta Cucina Naturale – Pietro Leemann, Owner and Chef – www.joia.it Branca – Nicolò Branca, Owner – www.branca.it Barilla – Giuseppe Morici, President Region Europe – www.barilla.com Proyecto Expo 2015 Chile – Guillermo Ariztia, Chile Pavillon Director – www.expomilan.cl Winery Il Cavallante, Milano – Sergio Morpurgo, Owner Heineken – Floris Cobelens, Marketing Director – www.heineken.com TRDN – Martin Oetting, Managing Director – www.trnd.com GROM – Federico Grom, Owner and Founder – www.grom.it/en Tetra Pak – Matthew Hatton, Director Competitor Intelligence – www.tetrapak.com BioHombre – Matteo Panini, CEO – www.hombre.it Acetaia Maletti – Carmen & Claudio Maletti Cantine Riunite & CIV – Vanni Lusetti, CEO; Francesca Benini, Sales & Marketing Manager; Elena Lottici, Export Manager; Mario Vandi, Brand Manager – www.riunite.it GlemGas – Marco Guerzoni, Program Product Manager – www.glemgas.com Bibendum Catering – LaFranceschetta58 – Sabrina Lazzereschi & Marta Pulini, Owners and Founders – www.bibendumcatering.it , www.franceschetta58.it DISCLAIMER - Since most of the videos are conducted with those whose native language is not English, we have decided to sometimes preserve their more emphatic speech to keep a tighter match between the audio and the subtitles.

This course covers communication skills that engineering leaders use every day to motivate, inspire, and support the people in their organizations. Speaking and writing are basic leadership communication skills. (We covered these topics in the Specialization course 1 and 3.) However, leaders also need to be skillful interpersonal communicators. Modern business requires communication skills that are effective across cultures, generations, and genders. Communication is also a key skill in building your personal brand. Leaders need to look, act, and speak like leaders. Another important leadership skill is the ability to handle difficult, emotional communications with employees, supervisors, and colleagues. Finally, engineers are often at the center of crisis communication. In this course, you will learn 1. How to communicate in a global environment, 2. How to communicate across cultures, generations, and genders 3. How to use communication to build your personal brand, communicate your values, and your leadership promise 4. How to handle high-stakes, emotionally charged, difficult conversations with employees, supervisors and your colleagues 5. How to handle crisis communication Required Material Disclaimer- The purchase of a case study is necessary to complete this course, as it is tied to an assessment. This case is an excellent illustration of the typical business situations requiring skillful handling of difficult conversations. Currently, the cost associated with this case study is $8.95 USD and is subject to change. Selected materials courtesy of Communiation Faculty at Rice University - all rights reserved.

Not so long ago, the job of product manager was about assessing market data, creating requirements, and managing the hand-off to sales/marketing. Maybe you’d talk to a customer somewhere in there and they’d tell you what features they wanted. But companies that manage product that way are dying. Being a product person today is a new game, and product managers are at the center of it. Today, particularly if your product is mostly digital, you might update it several times a day. Massive troves of data are available for making decisions and, at the same time, deep insights into customer motivation and experience are more important than ever. The job of the modern product manager is to charter a direction and create a successful working environment for all the actors involved in product success. It’s not a simple job or an easy job, but it is a meaningful job where you’ll be learning all the time. This course will help you along your learning journey and prepare you with the skills and perspective you need to: Create the actionable focus to successfully manage your product (week 1) Focus your work using modern product management methods (week 2) Manage new products and explore new product ideas (week 3) Manage and amplify existing products (week 4) This course is ideal for current product or general managers interested in today's modern product management methods. This course was developed with the generous support of the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.

People are the most valuable asset of any business, but they are also the most unpredictable, and the most difficult asset to manage. And although managing people well is critical to the health of any organization, most managers don't get the training they need to make good management decisions. Now, award-winning authors and renowned management Professors Mike Useem and Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School have designed this course to introduce you to the key elements of managing people. Based on their popular course at Wharton, this course will teach you how to motivate individual performance and design reward systems, how to design jobs and organize work for high performance, how to make good and timely management decisions, and how to design and change your organization’s architecture. By the end of this course, you'll have developed the skills you need to start motivating, organizing, and rewarding people in your organization so that you can thrive as a business and as a social organization.

The only thing you get to change is yourself, and in the prerequisites to this course we’ve given you real tools to do that. Now, use those tools to influence the course of your future, your team's future, and your organization's future. Make a plan for yourself that will help you help others, and learn skills to make it happen. Listening and being sure of your values underpins everything that comes with professional influencer and leadership soft skills. We’ll go on to look at self-assessment and leadership planning, negotiation, addressing and resolving conflict, and successfully identifying and promoting circumstances you want. After this course, you will be able to: - state your own mission and plan with confidence - negotiate and persuade - deal with difficult people - contribute to crafting a working environment you want to work in The prerequisites for this course are Courses One and Two of the Specialization "Professional IQ: Preventing and Solving Problems at Work".

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.