Program Design and contents
EMBA Module Strengthening Organizational Resilience
In this program, you will work toward a 5-day business trip to Rwanda where you will act as a consultant to help local entrepreneurs take their business to the next level. You will demonstrate this by integrating everything you have learned during the lecture weekends into the practical Rwandan business environment.
In 4 lecture weekends, you will build a broad and informed systemic perspective on the global business environment. You will learn to identify threats and opportunities in the market at an early stage so that your organization will be able to avoid and exploit them better and earlier than competitors. Not only will you future-proof yourself, but the organization you share your new skills and knowledge with will be able to future-proof itself based on your analysis and understanding of the global marketplace.
Leadership Workshops
During the lecture weekends, you will participate in 2 workshops that will prepare your leadership for a business context that is unfamiliar to you.
- Inclusive Leadership
- Intercultural Competence
The tools from the workshops will enable you to properly translate the new knowledge, skills and insights from the lecture weekends into practice and get the people you work with to join you.
The EMBA Module Strengthening Organizational Resilience consists of 4 college weekends followed by a business trip to Rwanda.
During the college weekends, the following themes take center stage.
- Micro Economics
- Macroeconomics
- Doing Business in a Complex World
- Doing Business in Emerging Markets
- 5-day business trip to Rwanda
Contents
Micro Economics
Successful business decisions require a deep understanding of economic structures and market dynamics. With a keen microeconomic perspective, you will learn to recognize patterns early so that you can respond strategically to opportunities and manage risks effectively. This will enable you to sustainably position your organization for growth and innovation.
Macro Economics
By better understanding macroeconomic forces shaping markets and industries, you will increase your organization's future resilience. You will learn to strategically anticipate global trends, allowing you to make the most of opportunities and effectively position your organization in a constantly changing world.
Doing Business in a Complex World
Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA) characterize the ever-changing world in which organizations operate. How do you successfully deal with these challenges? How do you transform uncertainty into a strategic advantage and exploit the opportunities these developments bring?
Business trip Rwanda
The business trip to Rwanda is not a standard study tour, but an intensive exploration of how organizations operate in emerging markets. During the day you are not in a classroom or a hotel meeting room, but in the middle of Rwandan society. You experience up close how people work, do business and live. Thanks to this maximum immersion in a totally different world, this experience will stay with you forever and will forever change the way you look at your own organization's business environment.
In Kigali, you will meet Rwandan entrepreneurs, whom you will help to take steps forward with your expertise and insights.
You will also visit the Kigali Genocide Memorial, a poignant and essential site that puts Rwanda's history in perspective. This visit offers deep insight into the country's resilience and reconstruction and helps you better understand how historical events affect contemporary society and economy.
Later in the program, you will visit a local business, where you will see up close how companies operate in an emerging market. This provides a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience and learn from the innovative ways Rwandan entrepreneurs are tackling challenges and seizing opportunities.
Together with your fellow participants, you will work as a consultant for a Rwandan company. Based on input from the organization and your MBA knowledge, together you will formulate actionable strategic recommendations. During this exercise you will find that, despite your relevant expertise, you and your fellow participants learn as much-or even more-from the client as the other way around.
This business trip is not a one-way street; it is a peer-to-peer learning exchange disguised as a problem-solving exercise. We do not come to tell "how to do it," but to encourage, inspire and learn from each other.
A Word from our Academic Director
Two fish are going for a swim together one morning. They come across a third fish, who says, "Good morning. How's the water today?" To which the two fish look at each other in amazement, and one asks the other, "Water? What is water?"
It may be a cliché, but it is fitting: how do you explain water to a fish? You can only begin to do that the moment you take the fish out of the water. I myself moved to the U.S. when I was 15. At that time I received a lot of questions about the Netherlands. I noticed that I had never thought about a lot of very understandable questions. So that experience, where I had no answers to those kinds of questions, made me very curious about Dutch people and Dutch culture. So I learned a lot about my own water by leaving that water.
THAT is what this program accomplishes, but from the business context. In the end, it's not about understanding what China's role is on the world stage, or what the circumstances are in Rwanda. What matters is that you have to let go of a lot of truths and assumptions in order to make a meaningful contribution in Rwanda. And then to look back, from that new perspective, at your own context, that's golden.
Executive Professor Dr. Roemer Visser
Time investment
'The program has a lead time of 6 months during which you will participate in 4 3-day college weekends and a 5-day trip to Rwanda. The course load is 16-18 hours per week.
Certificate
Upon successful completion, you will receive a certificate of participation. This may eventually count towards an Executive MBA degree, if you complete all 4 EMBA modules and complete your final project (Capstone).
