MBA Elective Subjects

Brand Management

Open your mind to the challenges of building, protecting and strengthening a brand.

You will take an applied approach to examining how to manage a brand, including the research, strategy and architecture that goes into developing a brand and ways to build, position and extend a brand as found in B2B, consumer and luxury retail brand strategies.

Discover the science of extracting useful information from business data.

You will learn to distinguish between business decisions that require predictive models, those that require targeting methods and, most importantly, those that require causal analysis to support managerial interventions.

Business Law

Introduce yourself to the core legal concepts and current legal issues impacting Australian business.

You will cover business structures, company law, contracts, competition law and property law – drawing on key legislation and court cases to illustrate the interaction between business and law as you gain an understanding of legal methodology and the legal basis of many commercial issues across organisations.

Consumer Behaviour

At its essence, marketing and business more broadly is an attempt to influence consumer behaviour.

Discover how to use insights from behavioural economics, psychology, sociology, and anthropology to understand and predict consumer behaviour, using behavioural science to maximise marketing impact.

Corporate Finance

Hear from CFOs and look through their eyes on the big financial questions facing firms to discover how finance supports but also constrains strategy.

You will learn about how finance supports the implementation of strategy through the capital budgeting and project evaluation process, risk management policies, strategies and instruments (options, swaps, futures, etc.), different ways of financing the firm, and the important issues in working capital.

Corporate Strategy

Leaders need to make decisions regarding firm boundaries and capital allocation, which require decisive rules for expansion and divestments.

Discover the frameworks and tools for making decisions regarding geographic, vertical and horizontal scope of the firm, and delve into the concepts of synergy and corporate advantage, ultimately equipping yourself to identify strategically valuable resources and develop strategies for winning in multiple businesses by leveraging those resources.

Financial Analysis and Valuation

Learn to interpret and analyse financial statements in order to extract useful information for better decision-making and assessing the financial health of an organisation.

You will examine businesses through their strategy and interaction with the environment, test the economic reality of their accounting numbers, learn how to analyse their results in order to forecast their likely future performance, all contributing to an ability to understand how their equity value can be estimated.

Financial Institutions

Learn how commercial banks, investment banks, wealth managers and insurers create value at different levels.

You will explore case studies, hear from guest speakers and use an analytical, non-mathematical, rigorous and highly applied framework to understand the rapid evolution of these financial intermediaries and the fintech challenges they face.

Fintech: Blockchain in the New Economy

Discover the peer to peer economy, where buyers and sellers, borrowers and lenders, and other partners come to deal directly with one another, bypassing intermediaries, such as retailers and banks.

You will be introduced to blockchain technology, digital currencies, cryptographic tokens, Initial Coin Offerings, trading cryptocurrency and regulation, learning how these technologies are disrupting traditional business and how different sectors of the economy function without intermediaries while depending on consensus and distributed ledgers.

Game Theory for Business Strategy

Anticipating how a stakeholder would react to a certain business decision can be the deciding factor in how a manager achieves successful outcomes.

Discover the critical and analytical tools to analyse a person’s choices through the concepts for individual decision‐making and strategic interaction (game theory).

Implementation of Strategy

Analyse the structural and behavioural issues that render an organisation’s strategy ineffective.

You will understand how the issues arise and learn ways to overcome them so that the organisation can achieve competitive advantage.

Innovation

Across two intensive weekends, introduce yourself to the concepts and techniques for innovating in small and large firms as you develop an innovation project.

Harness your creativity and skills in strategy, marketing and operations to work on a hands-on team project, where you must develop an entrepreneurial business idea and pitch it to a panel of industry judges.

Investments

Discuss and develop techniques for valuing financial investments.

You will gain knowledge of portfolio management, pricing and hedging with options on stocks and indexes, forward and futures contracts, monetary policy and how its conduct affects investment performance, and how to exploit market inefficiencies via investment.

Leadership and Change

Critically explore the changing notions of leadership in today's global business environment.

You will develop new insights about your own leadership capabilities and learn how to influence and lead with more impact through the experiential processes of the class.

Managerial Judgement

As we form judgments and make decisions, we fall prey to predictable and consistent errors that can impact the quality of our decisions and escalate conflict.

Learn the tried and true remedies and the newer methods that can be applied to mitigate your errors in judgment and improve your overall managerial and leadership style.

Managerial Project - A.T. Kearney Student Lab

Develop the skills necessary to complete a sustained piece of applied research in a real-world project, carrying it from problem recognition and definition to completion.

You will collaborate with A.T. Kearney consultants and industry clients to apply MBA theory and concepts to business challenges to deliver creative insights as potential solutions.

Managing Diversity in the Workplace

Diversity within an organisation can come in many forms, such as diversity of thought, cultural background, ethnicity, religion and more.

Discover the relevant scientific and applied information on the multiple facets of diversity, and ways to manage diverse people and related issues to be an effective manager and organisation in a global economy.

Marketing Communications

Explore what leading firms are doing in response to the changes affecting the discipline of marketing communications.

You will learn the concepts and techniques of contemporary communications, including design, planning and implementation, and develop fundamentals on managing multiple media, stakeholders, new technologies and risks of digitalisation.

Marketing Research

Conduct a full field-based marketing research project from problem definition to the presentation of the results.

Learn the process of marketing research to address the challenges faced by marketing managers and examine a variety of methods-both qualitative and quantitative-to generate marketing insights.

Marketing Strategy

Discover the benefits of undertaking marketing actions within a strategic framework.

Through analysis, planning, generating and calibrating strategic options, you will learn how a good marketing strategy works with the target segment to refine organisational vision and focus efforts on the most worthwhile of opportunities.

MBA Internship

Complete a four-week, full-time, work placement (or equivalent as part of a longer internship) that integrates MBA learning, employability and workplace culture.

You will gain proven communication, interpersonal, analytical, problem‐solving, organisational, time‐management and career-planning skills.

Mergers & Acquisitions

Merger and acquisition activity is a mainstay of the growth characteristics of large firms and has been a feature of business life for well over a century.

Take part in an end-to-end overview of the M&A process and discover the tools that managers need and use to make an effective contribution to M&A transactions.

Negotiations

Negotiation is the art and science of securing agreements between two or more interdependent parties.

Discover why people and organisations behave the way they do in competitive situations and come to understand the broad spectrum of negotiation problems faced by managers and professionals in a global context.

Supply Chain Management

Emerging globalisation trends and renewed emphasis on operations as a source of competitive advantage have put focus on how firms design and manage their supply chains.

Discover the firms using contemporary paradigms, frameworks and analytical techniques to analyse, manage and continuously improve supply-chain processes for different industries and markets.