Charles River Center

Designing & Managing Effective Sales Organizations

August 3 - 4, 2009

In the tough economic climate that we live in, firms are exploring how to organize their sales force and selling efforts to drive organic growth for the company while maintaining a lid on costs. They are looking to make every investment in the field sales force count. In this course, you will learn how to raise revenues and cut selling costs — by analyzing your selling effort, developing new sales skills, realigning territories, managing the channel and shifting emphasis across markets, products and services. You will explore how to hire, train, motivate and compensate sales people and third-party distribution channels for superior performance.

PROGRAM OBJECTIVES

• Changing Nature of Sales in Today’s World
• Sales and Marketing Integration
• Building the sales organization around customer-intimacy
• Assessment and development of new sales skills
• Managing Channel Partners
• Territory design and quota setting
• Managing the Sales Rep
• Compensation and control systems to manage the field sales organization
• Developing a key account management program

FACULTY:

Professor Das Narayandas

Broadband Changes Everything

July 16, 2009

Broadband Changes Everything is designed to provide an understanding of how broadband, and especially mobile broadband, is rapidly changing the world that we live in. These changes probably began ten years ago with the advent of music piracy. University students used the broadband available at their schools to download and swap music files for free. Then Napster and other file sharing sites were launched and the music industry began to sue everyone - the file sharing sites, the internet service providers, and finally their customers. Today with the emergence of the legal downloading of music, pushed by Apple with their iPod, iPhone, and iTunes as well as many others, the recording industry has been transformed and the CD is rapidly being replaced by the new format.

Just as the recording industry has been transformed, so have the newspaper, television, video game, retail shopping, and advertising industries also been transformed. And in this new broadband world, entire new industries have been created, such as social networking, which will continue to transform the competitive landscape.

FACULTY:

Professor Stephen P. Bradley

Premier Business Management Program: Leading and Managing in Times of Economic Crisis and Uncertainty

July 6 - 17, 2009

The Economic Crisis of 2008 and 2009 is creating unprecedented challenges for Businesses and Governments all over the World. This perfect economic storm has produced identical responses from Governments all over the world. The Premier Business Management Program (PBMP) is specially designed to focus on these issues. In this difficult economic environment, business and government leaders need to prepare themselves by carefully studying what has happened, what is likely to happen and how it will affect their organizations, and preparing strategies to permit their organizations to weather the storm and emerge stronger and more successful.

PROGRAM OBJECTIVES

• Provide you the opportunity to stand back from action and question your focus and beliefs, probing you to think deeply and creatively about the key strategic issues that are challenging your organizations brought about by the current difficult environment.
• Enable you to learn from experience of your peers how to survive under these challenging times, how to lead and manage under economic crisis and uncertainty.
• Enable you to position your organization to look for opportunities and invest in times of economic crisis and uncertainty.
• PBMP is intensive. It will use cutting edge technology and carefully selected new case studies and led by an experienced and renowned faculty. Several new Asian cases will be used, including newly developed Malaysian cases.

FACULTY:

Professor Stephen P. Bradley

Professor Nabil N. El-Hage

Professor Alan MacCormack

Professor D. Quinn Mills

CHANGING MINDS: The Art of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds

June 23 - 24, 2009

PROGRAM OBJECTIVES

• To learn the key techniques of changing minds
• To master the seven factors that impel significant shifts in people’s thinking
• To apply the techniques of changing minds to the Malaysian private and public sectors
• To determine what should be the right mindsets of private and public sectors leaders
• To become more helpful and supportive of businesses
• To address issues with an open mind and be prepared to listen
• To discharge duties with honesty, integrity and free from corruption

PROGRAM TAKEAWAY

• A commitment to improve service delivery as a work ethic rather than a bureaucratic activity
• A sense of urgency in the workplace, including attending to and resolving problems expeditiously, reducing red tape and elimination of down time in decision making
• A commitment to strong performance, hard work and willingness to listen and adapt to change
• A commitment to improve maintenance culture, reduce wastage, and be cost-conscious and effective
• A willingness to face and take on challenges instead of giving in to demands easily
• A commitment to global competitiveness through efficiency and innovation rather than subsidy
• An orientation toward financial risk taking based on project viability and cash flows rather than pure collateral, especially with regards to the provision of capital and financing needs of SMEs

FACULTY

Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also holds positions as adjunct professor of psychology at Harvard University, adjunct professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, and senior director of Harvard Project Zero. Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. In 1990, he was the first American to receive the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award in Education, and in 2000, he received a fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has received honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities, including institutions in Ireland, Italy, and Israel. In 2004, he was named an honorary professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai. The author of over 20 books translated into 23 languages, and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments.

D. Quinn Mills is Albert J. Weatherhead Jr., Professor of Business Administration Emeritius at Harvard Business School where he taught leadership and human resource management. Prof Mills consults with major corporations and Governments. A significant author, Mills’ recent books include The Financial Crisis of 2008-9 (published 2009) ; Rising Nations(published 2009); Master of Illusions: Presidential Leadership in America (published 2006), Leadership: How to Lead How to Live; Principles of Management(published 2005) and Principles of Human Resource Management (published 2006). He is also author of two other books on financial problems: Wheel, Deal and Steal: Deceptive Accounting, Deceitful CEOs and Ineffective Reforms; Buy, Lie and Sell High: How Investors Lost out on Enron and the Internet Bubble and Having it All, Making it Work. Professor Mills’ current research focuses on leadership, strategy, finance and human resource management.

Despite the importance of innovation for commercial success, few companies have mastered the ability to identify, create, and exploit opportunities for innovation on a systematic basis.

• What concepts can best help firms to manage the creation and pursuit of new ideas?

• And what capabilities must be developed in order to ensure that a firm’s innovation projects support its business strategy?

MIPD introduces a number of frameworks and tools to help the general manager develop strategies, processes, and organizational structures to successfully manage innovation. The program tackles issues at both the project level (e.g., how a firm can explore a wider variety of solutions to meet customer needs) and at the level of the firm (e.g., how a firm can identify new threats and opportunities emerging outside its immediate field of vision).

• How to increase the number of new ideas at the front-end of the innovation funnel.

• How to build a culture in which every employee feels responsible for innovation.

• How to design an experimentation platform for piloting and evaluating new ideas.

• How to manage complex projects in which there are a great number of “unknowns.”

• How to effectively monitor projects in which your organization is a “passive” investor.

Professor Alan MacCormack is an Associate Professor in the Technology and Operations Management area at the Harvard Business School. He has published extensively on the topic of managing innovation and product development. His particular focus is on high-technology industries, with a particular specialty in the software sector. His work explores the dynamics of product development in fast-paced environments, and the mechanisms by which firms can sense emerging threats to their core businesses and new opportunities for value creation. He is currently conducting a multi-year study of how firms use global collaboration networks to bring innovations to market. One of the key findings in this study is the need for corporations to collaborate with firms in different geographies that possess different skills.

Prof. MacCormack’s work has been recognized in a variety of leading books and journals including Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Management Science, and the Journal of Product Innovation Management. He has appeared on network television to discuss technology management and has been quoted extensively in the business press. The author of over 50 cases and teaching notes, Alan has worked with leading organizations like Intel, Microsoft and General Motors to help develop better approaches to managing innovation, and to better understand how firms can leverage global networks in the pursuit of newly emerging technologies.

Prof MacCormack received his doctorate from Harvard Business School in 1998, where he was a recipient of the George S. Dively award for distinguished research. He also holds a Masters degree in Management from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Bath in England. He currently teaches an MBA elective curriculum course titled “Managing Innovation in an Uncertain World,” which explores the mechanisms by which firms identify and exploit new innovation opportunities.

Strategy: Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage focuses on the general manager as he or she crafts the overarching strategy of the firm. The Program is built around the three most important jobs of the general manager for developing and executing the strategy for their organizations. Effective strategists excel at each of these three distinctive jobs.

First, good strategists need to be able to size up the external environment of a firm in its entirety. Second, effective strategists configure all of a firm’s choices to attain a competitive advantage within the external environment. Third, effective strategists are geared to sustain the advantage of a company over time in the face of competitive dynamics.

Professor Stephen P. Bradley is the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration Emeritus at the Harvard Business School. In addition to teaching Strategy in the required curriculum of the MBA Program, he is the faculty chair of the Executive Program Strategy: Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage.

Professor Bradley's current research interests center on the impact of technology on industry structure and competitive strategy. His most recent book, The Broadband Explosion: Leading Thinkers on the Promise of a Truly Interactive World, published by Harvard Business School Press (2005), argues that cheap and abundant bandwidth has the potential for creating new capabilities, markets, and strategies that will forever alter the business landscape. He has written numerous case studies and articles for academic journals, and three other books: Quantitative Methods in Management, Richard D. Irwin, Inc., Applied Mathematical Programming, Addison- Wesley, Inc., and Management of Bank Portfolios, John Wiley and Sons. Recent publications include “NTT DoCoMo: The Future of the Wireless Internet?” in the Journal of Interactive Marketing, 2002 and “Strategic Uncertainty and the Future of Electronic Consumer Interaction: Developing Scenarios, Adapting Strategies" in Digital Marketing: Global Strategies from the World's Leading Experts, John Wiley & Sons, 2001.

Professor Bradley received his BE in Electrical Engineering from Yale University where he was elected to TAU BETA PI, and his MS and PhD in Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to coming to Harvard, he was with the Center for Exploratory Studies of the IBM Corporation.

Effective negotiation in challenging situations is a vital characteristic of successful directors and executives. Whether launching a new company or keeping an established company at the top, business leaders must negotiate at every turn - often across national borders - to come to productive terms with potential partners, competitors, investors, board members, customers, suppliers and employees. The most effective negotiations are those that create long term sustainable value for both parties.

Using a highly interactive classroom approach, this intensive, two-day course offers the participants the concepts and skills necessary for making valuable deals and settling disputes.

well as dividing it, especially in longer term and repeated negotiations
• Dealing effectively with hard bargainers
• Negotiating "inside" as well as "among" organizations
• Negotiating across borders and over time
• Negotiating with many parties

Crisis situations are intrinsically chaotic, confusing, and highly stressful. In ordinary emergencies, there are people who have experience and training to help resolve the challenges, but in true emergencies there are unusual and little-understood elements that may depart from prior experience and thus confound prior planning. How can we best organize ourselves during the times of crises to make the bet possible progress? And what can we do in advance of the next crisis that will make it more likely that we will be able to manage it as effectively as we reasonably can?

In this one-day program, we will explore different kinds of emergency situations and examine their implications for the different ways in which we need to organize ourselves – in advance and in the moment – to deal with them. We will examine both the organizational implications (how best to organize action in the face of great uncertainty and stress) and the implications for individuals (how we can manage ourselves in stressful circumstances to produce the best possible effects). The program will proceed by developing concepts and examining specific crisis situations to observe lessons that will have general applicability in future events.

Across the globe, business leaders are struggling to balance conflicting demands from communities, government, advocacy groups, and others about the role they play in economic advancement, environmental improvement, and social development. No longer is it acceptable simply to make good products that satisfy customers while complying with laws and regulations. Businesses are now called upon to consider – and, indeed, intentionally to manage – the wider social and environmental consequences of their actions, beyond the requirements of the legal and regulatory settings in which they operate.

How can businesses best respond to these demands? How can they develop strategies that help them to build business value at the same time they address this broader set of concerns? And how can government and other organizations that want to encourage corporations to accept broader responsibilities best work with corporations to produce better outcomes (and less conflict)? In this one-day program, we will explore concepts that help to define appropriate roles for business – one the one hand, helping businesses to identify effective ways of building business value and social value at the same time, and, on the other hand, helping businesses to avoid inappropriate roles and responsibilities that might be thrust at them. We will examine a series of cases that illustrate several different positive models for navigating these complicated and turbulent waters.

Herman B. ("Dutch") Leonard is Eliot I. Snider and Family Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and the George F. Baker, Jr. Professor of Public Sector Management at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In addition, he serves as co-chair of the HBS Social Enterprise Initiative. He teaches extensively in executive programs at the Business School and the Kennedy School and around the world in the areas of general organizational strategy, governance, performance management, crisis management and leadership, and corporate social responsibility. His work on leadership focuses on innovation, creativity, effective decision-making, and advocacy and persuasion. His current work in leadership and management is focused on the relationship between governance, accountability, and performance, and emphasizes the use of performance management as a tool for enhancing accountability. He has also worked and taught extensively in the area of crisis management and on issues related to corporate social responsibility. He is the author of Checks Unbalanced: The Quiet Side of Public Spending (1984), of By Choice or By Chance: Tracking the Values in Massachusetts Public Spending (1992) and (annually from 1993 through 1999) of The Federal Budget and the States (an annual report on the geographic distribution of federal spending and taxation).

Successful leaders improve themselves continually. The world is always changing around us - in technology, economics and in the attitudes, expectations and capabilities of people. Leaders are effective when they keep up with the changes and utilize methods that are responsive. Effective leaders understand that better practices in leadership are always emerging. This program identifies current best practices and offers illuminating and interesting examples. Managers and executives at middle and upper levels in their organizations will test and improve their own leadership practices in this exciting program.

Participants will take-away the following knowledge and skills from this Program:
• How to get the highest level of performance from your team
• How to turn a challenge to your advantage
• How to convince your peers to a course of action
• How to resolve differences among those who report to you
• How to model yourself after a successful leader
• How to deal successfully with the media
• How to lead outside your organization on its behalf
• How to demonstrate leadership skills that will advance your career

Private Equity is a program designed to provide participants with an intensive introduction to the Private Equity business and introduce analytical tools, techniques and best practices utilized in Private Equity deals. The program will look at Private Equity with 3 primary areas of focus:

• Looking at Private Equity deals with a finance focus on how Private Equity deals, opportunities, and transactions are evaluated.
• How and why “Active Investing" is frequently the preferred technique for creating value in Private Equity deals. Investors cannot afford to simply buy and hope for an increase in value but must know how they can actively create value over the life of the investment. Successful "active investors" must take a general management view of the world, attending to not only financial matters but issues around management teams, firm strategy and industry and market trends. The program will seek to look broadly at how active managers add value to their portfolios of investment, not just at the financial engineering end of the task.
• How the Private Equity firm is managed.

No one today can be surprised by the extraordinary growth of the international securitization and structured finance markets, nor by the critical roles they have come to play in the financing of sovereigns, corporate or financial institutions throughout the world. Users cite the cost-efficiency and credit rating advantages of the technique, as well as a variety of benefits from a capital ratio and risk management perspective.

Structured Finance is targeted at bankers, traders, corporate treasurers, regulators and others who want to develop more extensive expertise in this area. The current crisis in the US sub prime real estate, mortgage-backed securities and hedge funds and the contagion impact on credit and capital markets worldwide only bring into focus the need to understand these structured finance products better.

• Acute awareness of issuer and investor benefits from use of asset-based securities (ABS) techniques
• Extensive understanding of rating agency criteria on both the international and local level
• Thorough understanding of legal/ regulatory/accounting issues that drive successful transaction and execution
• A sense of current ABS market dynamics and composition and level of volumes and spreads
• Familiarity with exotic ABS structures involving unusually asset classes and high risk assets
• Review of other structured products including structured notes, leveraged loans and hybrid securities.

Oussama Nasr was a Managing Director in Citigroup’s emerging markets department, with responsibility for asset-backed securities and asset repackaging. He spent a few years in the bank’s global derivatives group where he focused on structured transactions in the equity-, credit-, tax and sovereign-risk arenas. During that time Oussama was a member of the ABS management team that won Euromoney’s “Best Bank for Asset-Backed Securities” award for three successive years.

Oussama is founder and Managing Director of DNA Training & Consulting, and has worked in executive education since 1997. Focusing primarily on international financial services, he provides consulting and executive education in the areas of derivatives, capital markets, risk management and asset/liability management for a number of major banks, securities firms, and institutional investors around the world.

Oussama began his professional career as a banking and securities attorney with the law firm of Shearman & Sterling, where he represented various commercial and investment banks in their domestic and international fund raising activities. He was involved in the rescheduling of Latin American debt and then in the earliest bond placements by issuers from that region.

In the past several years, Oussama has conducted programs regularly for ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas, Calyon, Citigroup, Euromoney Training, J.P. Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch International, PNC Bank, Salomon Smith Barney and Wachovia Bank, as well as a dozen institutions in the emerging markets. Oussama co-authored with Citigroup officers the Risk Magazine Supplement “Credit Derivatives – Issues and Opportunities” that was distributed with the June 2001 issue.

Oussama received his Bachelors and Masters degrees in mathematics from Cambridge University and his Juris Doctor degree from Cornell Law School.

Using a highly interactive classroom approach, this intensive, two-day course offers the participants the concepts and skills necessary for making valuable deals and settling disputes.

• Core negotiation concepts and framework
• Claiming value: the logic, psychology, and tactics for "dividing the pie" or doing pure "price deals"
• Creating and claiming value on a sustainable basis: the logic, psychology, and tactics for "expanding the pie" as well as dividing it, especially in longer term and repeated negotiations
• Dealing effectively with hard bargainers
• Negotiating "inside" as well as "among" organizations
• Negotiating across borders and over time
• Negotiating with many parties

PROFESSOR JAMES K. SEBENIUS specializes in analyzing and advising on complex negotiations. He holds the first Gordon Donaldson Professorship of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. In 1993, he took the lead in the School's decisions--unique among major business schools--to make negotiation a required course in the MBA Program and to create a Negotiation Unit (department) which he headed for several years. The Negotiation Unit grew to eight full time negotiation faculty teaching the required course to over 800 students per year as well as offering advanced deal making and negotiation courses to MBAs, doctoral students, and executives. Formerly on the faculty at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Sebenius also currently serves as a member of the Executive Committee of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Sebenius is a founder and principal of Lax Sebenius: The Negotiation Group LLC, a firm that provides negotiation advisory services to corporations and governments worldwide. Private clients of the Negotiation Group have included large corporations such as American International Group, AT&T, Lederle Labs, Sandoz, Lucent Technologies, Glaxo, Banamex, GE, GTE, Hewlett Packard, Northwest Water PLC, Reuters, US West, Time Warner, and Estée Lauder; financial firms such as the Blackstone Group, Charterhouse International, and Exeter Capital; small companies such as American Research and Development, Fusion Systems and Peak Health; as well as government agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the Foreign Ministry of Venezuela, and the Government of Indonesia.

Sebenius holds a Ph.D. from Harvard in business economics, a masters degree in Engineering- Economic Systems from Stanford's Engineering School, and an undergraduate degree (summa cum laude) from Vanderbilt in mathematics and English.

The General Manager as Strategist and Implementer is designed to improve the skills of General Managers and Senior Executives in the private and public sectors facing difficult, demanding challenges and changing environments. Among the challenges we will consider are strategic shifts, unexpected crisis, turnarounds, poorly functioning organizational cultures, ineffective teams, and high-risk situations.

The program will offer a range of tools and techniques for dealing with these challenges more effectively. Special attention will be devoted to the design and use of the critical organizational processes that General Managers and senior executives use to chart direction, mobilize and deploy resources, and ensure effective execution. Participants will be exposed to a range of best practices in each of these areas, with a strong focus on decision making, general management processes and practices, and change management.

The program will be intensely practical, with real-world examples drawn from leading organizations around the world. It will also be highly participatory, combining case study discussions, videos, and interactive lectures.

Professor Garvin's research interests lie in the areas of general management and strategic change. He is especially interested in organizational learning, business and management processes, and the design and leadership of large, complex organizations. He is the author or co-author of nine books, including General Management: Processes and Action, Learning in Action, Education for Judgment, and Managing Quality; more than twenty-five articles including "Change Through Persuasion," "What Every CEO Should Know About Creating New Businesses," and "What You Don't Know About Making Decisions" and eight CD-ROMs and videotape series, including A Case Study Teacher in Action, Working Smarter, and Putting the Learning Organization to Work. He is a three-time winner of the McKinsey Award, given annually for the best article in Harvard Business Review; a winner of the Beckhard Prize, given annually for the best article on planned change and organizational development in Sloan Management Review; and a winner of the Smith-Weld Prize, given annually for the best article on the University in Harvard Magazine.

Professor Garvin received an A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1974, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and a Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T. in 1979, where he held a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and a Sloan Foundation Fellowship.

PBMP is an intensive general management program. The program is designed for decision makers who lead organizations in the private and public sectors and execute strategies which require a broader set of general management insights and skills. Participants to PBMP should have significant managerial experience and currently hold senior corporate positions.

PBMP is designed to enhance the capability of successful leaders and senior executives from the private and public sectors. It is designed to help them move ahead in their careers and lead their organizations to greater heights.

PBMP is a 2-week rigorous residential program requiring full commitment and active participation. The contents and case studies have been specially selected to meet the needs of a diverse group of outstanding participants from different backgrounds and work experience.

More discerning customers, intense global competition, influx of information and interactive technologies that affect distribution channels, rapid technological changes and rapid commoditization are creating unprecedented challenges for directors and senior executives all over the world. Successful companies today are responding to these changes by focusing on driving sustained profitability and growth built around customer-centric marketing strategies.

The key to this is the strategic role played by branding. Brands are the bonds of trust that links suppliers and customers. Good or poor brand management can make the difference between profit and loss in the global economy. Strategic brand management is an important lever to, not only create and sustain customer value and but also enhance long-term customer loyalty. Strategic Brand Management is specially designed for directors and senior executives on how to manage their brands strategically and focus on the following:

PROFESSOR DAS NARAYANDAS is the James J. Hill Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is currently the course head of the required first-year Marketing course in the MBA program and the Co-Chair of Harvard Business School's Program for Leadership Development. His academic credentials include a Bachelor of Technology degree in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, a Post-Graduate Diploma in Management from the Indian Institute of Management, and a Ph.D. in Management from Purdue University.

Previously Das taught the Business Marketing Elective in the MBA program. He has been selected as the Class Day faculty speaker (MBA Classes of 2001 and 2004) and has received the award for teaching excellence from the graduating HBS MBA Classes of 2000 and 2003. Recent awards include the Greenhill Award that recognizes members of the HBS community who have made significant contributions to the School.

Das's background includes over six years of management experience in sales and marketing for various multinational firms that involved field sales and salesforce management, new product development, alliance formation, and marketing communications. His articles have appeared in publications that include Harvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Service Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, and Sloan Management Review. Das has been quoted in publications such as The Economist and U.S. World News and Report amongst others. He is a professional affiliate of the American Marketing Association and the Institute of Management Science. Das has consulted and/or developed and executed in-house training programs for such companies as Areva, Arrow Electronics, Alghanim Group, GE, Honeywell, Oce, J&J, Brambles, Northrop Grumman, RBS, Stryker, Merrill Lynch, Tata Group, Satyam, Liberty Mutual, 3M, Microsoft, Nortel, Praxair among other companies in the areas of B2B Marketing, Customer Management, Strategic Marketing, Pricing, Personal Selling and Sales Management. Das' current research interests focus on business-to-business marketing and management of customer relationships. In addition to being on the Board of Advisors of several firms including Color Kinetics Inc., Das’s is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Fessenden School, Newton and a member of the Board of Directors of the Harvard Student Agencies, Satmetrix and New England Peptides Corp.

Corporate Board members today face greater challenges than ever before. Board Members are expected to be knowledgeable, proactive and effective. They are required to be independent, responsible, transparent and accountable as well as to protect public and investors’ interests.

Board members perform 3 major roles: prevent financial oversight; help develop business of the company; support the CEO and senior management on their business strategy.

The key to an effective board starts with choosing the right Boards. This half day program on Appraising Board Performance is especially designed for directors of listed companies on appraising their boards performance and will focus on the following:

Appraising Board Performance designed to help board members to comply with the requirements of Bursa Malaysia on continuing education program (CEP).

The boom in private equity deals is rapidly changing the financial landscape worldwide. Whether the deal is for a leveraged buyout, unsolicited bid, venture capital, growth capital, mezzanine capital and others, more and more institutional and individual investors are pouring massive amount of funds into the private equity market in search of higher returns.

In 2005, private equity funds mobilized amounted to some USD232 billion, of which some USD135 billion were invested globally. Of this amount, 52% was raised in North America, 36% in Europe and 8% in Asia Pacific. Despite the recent correction, 2007 is expected to be another record year, due largely to cheap debt markets and ambitious CEOs and private equity fund managers pushing for more and larger deals. Over the past 10 years, the investments in Private Equity firms yielded a return of 11.4% a year vs. 6.6% for S&P 500. The score was 14.2% vs. 9.8% over a 20 years period. For the 12 months ended June 2006, the yield for PE firms was 22.5% vs. 6.6% for S&P 500. As impressive as those performance figures are, the top quartile performers have considerably outperformed the industry as a whole, with significant consistency.

This program is designed to provide participants with an intensive introduction to the Private Equity business and introduce analytical tools, techniques and best practices utilized in Private Equity deals. The program will look at Private Equity with two primary focus:

Structuring and Investing in Private Equity Deals will include a number of Private Equity case studies and also expose participants to all aspects of the business. The program will essentially follow the lifecycle of a deal:

Leadership is the most important element in the success of any organization. Outstanding leadership by its pioneers contributes strongly to an organization’s early success. But over time, organizations hire managers to administer them and when the pioneers retire, leadership is often lost to managers. The two are very different and both are necessary. Leadership involves energizing followers to pursue the leader’s vision. Leadership is a role and it can be learned. This program will examine different styles of leadership and how to master them.

The program will look at leadership in different key roles: setting vision, managing crisis, leading change, mentoring, building top management teams and succession planning.Generally organizations need more leadership to accompany management skills. The most effective leadership styles are directive, participative and empowering. These styles will be examined in detail to help participants master them. Leadership is a very personal thing, with each person developing his or her own approach. Key tools of the leader are effective teamwork and partnering with other leaders in the organization. Teamwork among executives and managers can develop more leadership in the organization.

Driving Organizational Performance in today’s competitive global environment requires financial and non-financial measures, new management tools and control systems that are aligned with the organization’s missions and goals. This one day program on Key Performance Indicators (KPI), Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Goal Alignment is organized into 3 parts. Part 1 focuses on KPI; Part 2 on BSC and Part 3 on Goal Alignment. Throughout the program the focus will be on how to develop a comprehensive understanding on how an organization measures its performance from a top management perspective and make appropriate decisions based on this new management framework and align the organization’s goals

GEORGE P. BAKER III is the Herman C. Krannert Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He has published works on management incentives, leveraged buyouts, organizational economics, and the relationship between a firm's ownership structure and its management. Baker's recent work has focused on the problem of managerial performance measurement, and its role in the design of incentive systems and on the structure and performance of organizations. He is also the author of a book on the firm of Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co. published by Cambridge University Press.At HBS, Baker teaches in the MBA program, as well as in the doctoral program. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard, he worked both as a consultant with Temple, Barker and Sloane, and as a marketing manager with Teradyne Inc. Baker holds a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School

Prof. Baker was a member of the faculty of Premier Business Management Program (PBMP) in 2005. He will also be a faculty member of PBMP in 2007.

Globalization, intense competition, technological changes, major accounting scandals, rising stock market volatility and deregulation have created a highly challenging business environment in which Mergers & Acquisitions and Corporate Restructuring are increasingly used to seek competitive advantage and maximize value for shareholders. Failure to respond to these challenges may result in companies becoming targets of predators, loss of control and even extinction in the playing field of corporate control where winners take all. In 2006, M&A worldwide amounted to USD3,900 billion, 16% more than the peak of the dotcom boom year in 2000. In this market, company control is exchanged through the purchase and sale of equity. An increasing number of the M&A are hostile bids, with company buyouts doubled that of 2005.

Directors and senior executives of companies make decisions based on financial information provided to them by management. Whether the decision is to secure funding, assess the company's performance, invest in new businesses or increase shareholders’ value, directors and senior executives need to understand the flow of financial resources, the fundamentals of finance and how to use the financial information and tools effectively. These tasks, already difficult even for the practitioners, pose major challenges for directors and senior executives who are not trained or have little exposure to finance in the quick-moving and rapidly changing global financial marketplace. New tools, new technologies, exotic financial instruments and sophisticated techniques do not make their work any easier.

Finance for Directors and Senior Executives is a program specially designed for directors and senior executives who have little or insufficient exposure to finance but who want to understand the fundamentals of finance and apply them. Directors and senior executives of finance who want to be updated on the subject will also find the program useful. The program is structured to help you participate in discussions on matters involving finance, speak with a common vocabulary, ask the right questions and make better financial decisions.

This is not a program on analytics and number crunching. Directors and senior executives do not crunch numbers. This is usually done for them by management.