Summer 2025

This module explores concepts and frameworks in corporate strategy and generates financial awareness, all in the context of international Business. We will apply strategy and finance to the issues of growth and innovation in highly volatile and competitive markets. This implies a careful consideration of external and internal analysis, financing innovation and leveraging of unique resources, distinctive competences, and dynamic capabilities. You will explore business-level and corporate-level strategies, assess strategic choices in terms of direction and methods, and understand how to evaluate strategies for suitability, feasibility, and acceptability.

Throughout the module, you will engage in mini cases analysis, and group discussions to contextualise theoretical concepts on real-world examples. We equally take a critical and practice-driven approach to strategy making and its finance. The emphasis on critical evaluation ensures students understand not just the application but also the limitations of strategic tools, fostering adaptability and agility in dynamic business environments.

The module will be instrumental for the competency to make strategic decisions that are backed by rigorous assessment of organisational capabilities, competitive position and backed with credible financial resources.

As a Business School with emphasis on responsible management, we will draw associations with the UN Sustainable Development Goals 8.Decent Work and Economic Growth, 9.Industry Innovation and Infrastructure and 16.Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions.

Note: Students enrolled on this module: RBPL123_363_202430 also have access to this Moodle site via Meta link enrolment.

As part of your MBA or MSc with Professional Experience Year, you are enrolled in this Placement Preparation module (which includes a series of workshops) that take place in Semester 1/Year 1 of your studies. This required module is to support you in finding a placement and is a prerequisite for doing the Placement module in Year 2 of your programme. The workshops and activities in this module are designed to help you find and secure your own placement and develop key professional skills and knowledge to succeed in the world of work. Key aims/learning objectives: • understand what transferable and “sellable” skills and strengths are whilst recognising and addressing individual areas for development; • build knowledge of sectors and roles of interest including what skills employers are looking for; • practice how to “win” at the process of employment, especially how to tailor your CVs, interview skills, and digital submissions for a specific role; • locate appropriate services and resources that will help you with your career planning and placement search.

This module extends and develops understanding of the standard approach to decisions based on optimization: utility maximization amongst individuals and profit maximization among firms. The module shows how this approach can be embedded in formal models of equilibrium exploring a variety of competitive situations, including strategic interactions among businesses and intertemporal choice. Completion of the module provides an essential framework and pathway for understanding more advanced economics. Students will be able to recognise various interactions between firms and their markets and develop a critical awareness of instances of market failure.

This module is designed to introduce you to the essential concepts and skills used in business problem solving. Excel is used to identify and interpret quantitative data to solve a range of problems, including customer satisfaction, personal finance issues, business modelling, quality assurance, recruitment issues and supply chain problems. The emphasis is on case studies drawn from a bank of case studies relating to real business situations.

This module is designed to introduce you to the essential concepts and skills used in modern marketing management. An organisation's customers represent one of its most important assets and marketing is about identifying and satisfying customers' needs and wants and responding by providing appropriate products and services.

This module introduces students to the modern marketing environment where digital technologies such as websites and communications involving social media are increasingly important. The underlying theories behind many key marketing decisions, such as pricing of goods and services, the use of promotional tools such as advertising and digital marketing, will be covered. The use of marketing campaigns will also be covered.

This module provides you as marketing students with strategic insight into how to develop solid data and analytics capability, all which will guide you in operational and strategic marketing decisions. In the age of data, high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety data is being produced at an unprecedented rate, which has dramatically enhanced marketers’ means of capturing and processing data to measure the effectiveness of marketing strategies and campaigns. The module focuses on introducing you to the foundations of data analysis techniques, data-driven marketing campaigns, and big data analytics capability. You will gain insight into the role of data from a marketing perspective and be better equipped to make management decisions to deliver data-driven strategies. You will also develop the statistical skills and knowledge that can be applied to practical data cases in an organisational context. You will be able to turn data into actionable insights to improve the performance of digital marketing campaigns based on a business case.

The Consultancy Project module gives you the opportunity to apply the knowledge, analytical, and conceptual tools, as well as the personal skills gained from the taught courses to an in-depth study of a specific organizational issue or problem in the fields of global financial management, marketing management, business management, and human resource management. It consolidates the learning that has already taken place, and develops your capability to undertake and complete an individual project and address a given problem. This module may be taken with or without a business internship, so long as there is an identified business client.

This module aims to provide students with an introduction to different types of business organisations and the environments that they operate within. Using London's vibrant business ecosystem as our laboratory, the module will mainly focus on the factors affecting businesses that are located in advanced economies. The analysis and discussion will centre around issues that relate to industrial structure, international trade and technological change, with case studies drawn from London's financial district, tech sector, and creative industries (e.g., Canary Wharf, Silicon Roundabout, Shoreditch). Although factors affecting businesses in developing countries/emerging economies will be covered to a certain extent, there will be less of a focus on businesses operating in such environments. Similarly, economic, financial and technological influences on organisations will be emphasized, although political, social, cultural, legal and environmental factors will also be covered through an introduction to PESTLE analysis.

This module provides you with a comprehensive understanding and critical appreciation of concepts and issues on supply chain management, strategies and processes in a global context. The module addresses the supply chain as a global system which includes critical processes to be managed such as materials, services and information. In so doing, the module develops your understanding of interrelationships and integration of different members in the chain. To achieve this, the module provides a critical analysis of different supply chain strategies and their potential fit to alternative supply chain structures and models. The content focuses on international supply chain operations in the context of a global business environment. A range of seminars will use international case studies (e.g. global businesses) to help you build your knowledge and understanding of managing global logistics and supply chain operations. As a student on the MGBM programme, you are expected to demonstrate relevant knowledge of organisations in their external and international context. This module has been included in the programme to support this rationale by providing you with the understanding that all organisations are a part and member of at least one global supply chain. Since this module focuses on the critical supply chain processes and strategies in a global context, you will be able to understand, respond and shape the dynamic and changing nature of businesses within the global supply chain context which is also aligned with the rationale of the MGBM programme as a whole.

What is a business organisation and what external factors affect its objectives and how well it performs? These are the sort of questions that are examined in this module, which provides an introduction to different types of business organisations and how they interact with the different environments that they operate within. The module particularly focuses on the factors affecting businesses that are located in advanced economies, as well as in developing countries/emerging economies (to a lesser extent). As a result, there will be a focus on issues relating to market and industrial structure, international trade and technological change. However, in addition to emphasizing the economic, financial and technological factors that can impact on business organisations, political, social, cultural, legal and environmental influences will also be considered.

You interact with an organisation from the time you first join a school to, long after you retire. Therefore, it is important to develop a good understanding of how to behave towards as well as within an organisation. Organisations are evolving living organisms – where people, productions and processes are continuously interacting with, and responding to the internal and external environments. As such, Organisational Behaviour covers the relationships between individuals, between groups within an organisation and between an organisation and the external environment. Through various types of organisational interactions (student, employee, consumer, patient), you will learn the behaviours that are appropriate, as each organisation is a unique entity. You will also understand the impact of events in the 2020s, such as Covid 19, Black Lives Matter protests and global warming on how the world has changed the way it works. Covid 19 forced organisations and individuals to change behaviours by adopting remote working, online shopping, gig economy and extensive use of technology such as virtual meetings, online teaching, online consultations with doctors etc. The Black Lives protests have highlighted the social inequalities and racial disparities in societies and workplaces, across continents. The dire future scenarios relating to the impact of climate change on the climate has forced organisations to change how they work, for example Zara now having to address its ‘fast fashion’ strategy of providing new clothing lines every 3 weeks. A study of organisational behaviour will enable you to understand your own behaviours, attitudes and performance, as well as those of the people with whom you will be working. You will learn how to use technology, remote working, diversity, equality and inclusion towards the creation and sustenance of strong organisational cultures and effective work teams in an environment that must be sustained for future generations.

April