Results for OB

Our seminar is designed for students interested in improving their communication skills. Right now, you probably don't spend much time thinking about the way you communicate, nor are you likely, in the academic setting, to get much feedback on the messages you send. Yet the quality of your communication will have a large impact on your overall effectiveness in building relationships and getting things done, both in the university setting and later in your career. Each of the sessions in our seminar will help you appreciate the nature and complexity of communication and provide guidelines for both improving your communication style and recognizing the unique styles of others. In each class session, we'll consider a number of well-studied forms of interpersonal communication. And, we'll rely heavily on experiential learning to bring the concepts to life. For example, to better understand the dynamics of unstructured, spontaneous communication, we will participate in an improvisational theatre workshop, taught by one of the artists-in-residence at the Groundlings Theater in Los Angeles. To better understand persuasive communication tactics, we'll participate in role-play exercises, competitive games, and negotiation simulations. For each tactic, we'll talk about why it works, when it works best, and what its limitations might be. We'll discuss how you can put these approaches to work in order to support your goals. After taking this course, you will be better able to: (1) identify strategies for crafting effective communication in the form of everyday conversation, written work, and public presentations, (2) develop techniques for building strong, long-term relationships with your peers, and (3) become more persuasive in advancing an agenda, acquiring resources, or gaining support from others. These skills will be invaluable to you as you grow and develop here at Stanford and beyond.

Why do individuals participate in intergroup conflict? Should we celebrate differences or de-emphasize them to improve intergroup interactions? What roles do gender, race, and culture play in everyday workplace interactions, such as networking and negotiating? Intergroup relations in the 21st century raise significant theoretical and practical questions related to intergroup conflict and cooperation, prejudice and discrimination, and the interests, identities, ideologies and institutions that shape interactions between "us" and "them". Together, we will explore cognitive, affective, behavioral, social and organizational processes that shape how we navigate intergroup interactions. This course builds on concepts and research findings from social psychology, judgment and decision making, sociology, cognitive science, and management. You will have opportunities to present, discuss and debate classic and current research findings in this field. You will also have opportunities to play an active role in intergroup exercises and simulations (e.g., a cross-cultural negotiation). By the end of this course, you should have a deeper understanding of the problems and the solutions that social scientists work on in the domain of intergroup relations, as well as of how academic research relates to ongoing efforts to promote JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) initiatives and policies in organizations and society at large. Your final grade in this course will be based on evaluation of your brief reflection write-ups, in-class participation in our activities, and final paper.

This course introduces you to the science of teams. Particularly, the class focuses on the structures and processes that affect team performance, highlighting common pitfalls associated with working in teams and introducing strategies to maximize team potential. Topics include team composition and diversity, team creativity and decision-making, team leadership and influence, intra-team and inter-team conflict, and team member coordination. You will participate in a number of exercises to illustrate principles of teamwork and to give you practice not only diagnosing team problems but also taking action to improve total team performance.

Building on the discipline of social psychology, this course helps you cultivate mindsets and build skills to understand the ways in which organizations and their members affect one another. You will learn frameworks for diagnosing and resolving problems in organizational settings. The course relates theory and research to organizational problems by reviewing basic concepts such as individual motivation and behavior; decision making; interpersonal communication and influence; small group behavior; and dyadic, individual, and inter-group conflict and cooperation.

In the Leadership Labs class we ask you to consider the question, "Why would anyone follow YOU?" This is a course in which you consider what kind of leader you want to be, what kind of leader you are, and how to align your leadership behavior with your leadership goals. In this class you will have an opportunity to share in the leadership of your squad and, in doing so, to discover your strengths and challenges as a leader. You will receive feedback about your approach to leadership and you'll have the opportunity to try out new skills and tools. Your squad is made up of you and five of your classmates, who will work together in Leadership Labs every week of the quarter. At your weekly meetings, your squad will engage in a mix of experiential exercises, case role plays and team discussions and negotiations. You and your squadmates will develop individual learning goals to support your personal leadership development. You will also define the learning culture you want to create in your squad and how you will uphold this culture throughout the quarter. As the quarter progresses, you will track and discuss productive and unproductive dynamics in the squad. All of these activities are designed to help you think more deeply about how your squad is working together and to allow you to practice and experiment with new ways of leading. You will have the opportunity to solicit a great deal of feedback so you can achieve a deeper understanding of the impact of your behavior on others. And many of the activities your squad will do together will be videotaped for your self-review afterwards. In each Lab session, one squad member will be the Meeting Lead for the session. MBA1 squad members will rotate through the Meeting Lead position. Your squad will have a dedicated MBA2 Leadership Fellow who will be present for these meetings to provide team coaching to the squad as a whole. You will also meet with your Fellow for individual coaching support outside the weekly Labs session. Finally, the quarter culminates with the Executive Challenge, an opportunity for you to further refine your leadership skills by engaging with alumni judges in role plays that test your ability to lead effectively. The alumni will evaluate your performance and provide you feedback.

This course examines fundamental issues of general management and leadership within an organization. You will learn about setting an organization's strategic direction, aligning structure to implement strategy, and leading individuals within the firm. You will study the interplay among formal structure, routines, informal networks, and culture in shaping organizational performance and how to make changes to these facets to adapt and change to the environment in order to build more innovative companies.

Building on the discipline of social psychology, this course helps you cultivate mindsets and build skills to understand the ways in which organizations and their members affect one another. You will learn frameworks for diagnosing and resolving problems in organizational settings. The course relates theory and research to organizational problems by reviewing basic concepts such as individual motivation and behavior; decision making; interpersonal communication and influence; small group behavior; and dyadic, individual, and inter-group conflict and cooperation.

Effective managers and leaders should be familiar with the strategy and psychology of conflict and negotiate effectively with other persons, departments, organizations, and stakeholders. Hence, the first aim of the course is to develop your ability to analyze conflict and negotiation situations. Concepts from the course will enable us to look beneath the surface rhetoric of a conflict, to isolate the important underlying interests at stake, and to determine what sort of negotiated settlement (if any) is feasible in a given situation. In addition to understanding how to analyze conflict and negotiation situations, to manage effectively, you must have a broad repertoire of behavioral skills that can be applied to the various conflict and negotiation situations you are likely to encounter. Therefore, a second aim of the course is to allow you to experience various bargaining situations by playing a role in simulated negotiations. Our exercises will allow you to try out tactics that might feel uncomfortable trying in an actual negotiation, get constructive feedback from your counterparts and classmates, and learn how you come across. This course is an intense, compact version of longer negotiation courses (electives OB381 and OB581); thus, students should not take either of these courses as there is considerable overlap among the three. Attendance and participation in the negotiation exercises are mandatory.

Why do large, successful companies often have such difficulty in disrupting themselves (e.g., Kodak, Blockbuster, Borders)? How do you maintain an entrepreneurial edge within an existing enterprise? How do you sustain core businesses while simultaneously adapting to disruptive threats? In this course, students will build the skills to spot threats and opportunities earlier and capture them faster. The course will take a look at some of the most successful "creators within corporations" and discern why some strategies succeed when others do not. We will explore the framework that some companies have developed to simultaneously compete in their core business while exploring new ones. To do this we will interact with guests from firms like Walmart, Amazon, General Motors, Flex and IBM as well as venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Our objective is to help students understand in some detail what it takes to help organizations stay ahead of disruptive threats and to avoid problems that often lead companies into decline. (Previously offered as OB 513)

The Arbuckle Leadership Fellows Program plays an integral role in the GSB leadership curriculum by bringing together a group of talented second years to support the leadership development of the first-year class. OB330, an 8 unit two-quarter MBA2 elective course (in combination with OB331), is the academic component of this program and runs the entirety of both Autumn and Winter Quarters. Both quarters must be completed to receive any units of credit. The course is open only to those students who have applied and been accepted into the Leadership Fellows Program. Interested students apply at the start of Winter Quarter of their first year and undergo a competitive application process, after which successful applicants are invited to take part in the program. Informational meetings are held late in Autumn Quarter and during the first week of Winter Quarter and Fellows are selected from the first year class in mid- Winter Quarter. Knowing how to develop others is a crucial leadership competency. In this class, Fellows develop the advanced leadership skills of leading leaders and developing others through coaching and mentoring. Among the competencies developed in this class are: 1) Team Coaching Skills (e.g. facilitating a group, diagnosing group dynamics, debriefing, coaching without undermining the leader), 2) Individual Coaching Skills (e.g. effective inquiry, asking powerful questions, balancing support and challenge, providing effective feedback, holding others accountable, utilizing, valuing and connecting across differences and power differentials, using oneself in service of another's development) and 3) Personal Development Skills (e.g. self-reflection and self-awareness, leveraging strengths, stretching outside one's comfort zone.) In the Autumn Quarter Fellows are assigned to a squad of six MBA1s in Leadership Labs. Fellows guide their MBA1 squad through the learning process in the Labs and provide both individual and team coaching to their MBA1 squad members. In addition to the work with their MBA 1 squad, Fellows provide in-depth 1:1 coaching to three additional MBA1 students who are not members of their squad. This 1:1 coaching begins after Autumn midterms and continues through the end of Winter Quarter. Fellows classes meet twice a week for 105 minutes. There will be a reading list of conceptual material which will be supplemented during class with lectures discussions and activities. Students will apply concepts through role-playing and experiential exercises during class time as well as in their coaching and mentoring of their MBA1 coachees. Additionally, Fellows will attend weekly Leadership Labs with the first year squad to which they have been assigned and meet 1:1 with MBA1 coachees. Fellows meet regularly with five of their peers in "clinics," standing groups led by Leadership Labs Instructors who are also GSB Leadership Coaches. Fellows meet with their Leadership Coach and clinic approximately every other week during regular class time to discuss specific strategies for working with their first year students. Fellows also periodically meet with their Leadership Coach one-on-one to hone their skills and explore their areas for specific improvement. Note: OB374, Interpersonal Dynamics, is a PRE-REQUISITE for this course; students who want to be Fellows are advised to assess whether that is a class they want to take in the spring quarter of their first year. Additionally, signing up for 1:1 coaching by a Fellow as an admit strengthens a MBA1 student's application to the Arbuckle Leadership Fellows program.

This course is the continuation of Leadership Fellows I, an 8-unit course that begins in Autumn Quarter. During this quarter Fellows will continue to deepen their coaching and mentoring skills, and will focus exclusively on in-depth 1:1 coaching with three MBA1 coachees (who were not members of their MBA1 squad.) Classes and clinics continue as in Autumn Quarter.

The ability to function effectively within a hierarchy is a crucial determinant of managerial success, yet many people struggle with "authority issues" that make certain hierarchical roles and positions difficult for them. This course draws on the craft of acting and the science of psychology to help students learn to use themselves to develop the characters that can play these roles effectively. This class is designed specifically for students who have trouble "playing" authoritative roles: those who find it difficult to act with power, status, and authority. It will also be useful for students who find it difficult to share power and authority, which involves accepting and deferring to the power and authority of others. Participants will be asked to read, think deeply about, and share some of their own feelings about power and authority, and the origins of those feelings. They will also be asked to prepare for and present a series of in-class performances that involve playing characters with and without power, in scenes that highlight the interactions and relationships between high and low power characters. These performances will take up much of our time during class. Out-of-class assignments will include reading important works on psychology, and on the theory and practice of acting, as well as writing short essays analyzing their own and others' performances.

The ability to help others develop is an often over-looked core competency for leaders. This course will give students an opportunity to learn fundamental coaching skills, so they can become coaching leaders who know how to develop others. This course is designed to be very experiential. While conceptual frameworks will be introduced through readings, lectures, demonstrations and discussions, the only real way to learn coaching skills is to both practice coaching, and to be coached. Every class session will provide opportunities to do both: coach and be coached. Because the in-class coaching practice will not be role plays but will actually be real coaching sessions between students, this course will demand a high level of engagement and participation from each student.

Leading and managing in complex, high stakes settings, like health care, where lives and livelihoods are on the line, presents distinctive challenges and constraints. This course challenges you to apply seminal and contemporary theories in organizational behavior to evaluate managerial decisions and develop evidence-based strategies for leading and managing health care teams and organizations. Topics include leading systems that promote learning; implementing change; and interdisciplinary problem-solving, decision-making, and collaboration. Group work and exercises will simulate high pressure and risk-taking under uncertainty. While this course will focus on application to health care situations, cases are drawn from multiple sectors and lessons are relevant to other settings including consulting, banking, and high tech. Prior experience in the health sector is not required.

What does it mean to be a principled leader? What role do values play in an organization, and how do successful leaders apply their values in their daily business lives? This course examines the concept of principled leadership and the various ways that leaders try to institutionalize particular values within the organizations they lead. Equally important, it explores the difficult challenges that leaders sometimes face when trying to apply their principles in a tough, fast-paced business environment, where others may not share the same expectations. Through assigned readings, interactive lectures with visiting executives, and weekly small group discussions, students will learn how practicing leaders implement their principles, while reflecting the realities of different cultural expectations and meeting business demands. The course will provide a forum for students to learn directly from practicing leaders and to think introspectively about their own personal values, leadership styles, and long-term aspirations.

This course asks the question: "What does it take to build high-performance?" The focus is on middle and upper-middle management in contemporary organizations that have complex tasks, exist in a rapidly changing environment, and have highly skilled subordinates. The premise of the course is that traditional methods of management may produce adequate levels of performance but prevent excellence from developing. New approaches to leadership will be presented that are more likely to lead to a truly high-performing system. Time will be spent discussing the components of effective leadership, what a manager can do to build a compelling vision, strong teams, and mutual influence sideways and upwards as well as with direct reports. Also, what members can do to support the leader who wants to initiate such changes. Students will meet in a Skill Development Group to apply the course material to their own personal development. The expectation is full attendance at all SDG meetings. Only one excused absence. Attendance is required in EIS Simulation and the Consulting Project classes.

PRE-QUALIFICATION IS REQUIRED BY THE DEADLINE (APPROXIMATELY FIVE WEEKS BEFORE THE QUARTER BEGINS). The focus of this course is to increase one's competencies in building more effective relationships. Learning is primarily through interactions with other T-group members. This course is very involving, and, at times, can be quite emotional. However, this course is not a substitute for therapy. If you are in therapy, please talk this over with your therapist and get their advice before enrolling in this course. T-groups meet during part of class-time as well as in the evening. T-groups for all sections will meet for 3 hours in the evening. For 1-day/week sections groups will meet the same evening as class. For 2-day/week sections, please see course details. The class has a weekend retreat toward the end of the quarter (check section details for specific dates). It is very important to note that when you decide to take this course, you make an explicit contract to be actively involved. ATTENDANCE: Because of the highly interactive nature of this course, it is very important that all students attend all sessions. Missing class, class T-group, evening T-group, or any portion of the weekend for an unexcused absence will negatively influence your grade and may result in your grade being dropped one grade level (for each absence). Attendance to the first class is required for all sections and failure to attend the first class will result in an automatic drop. Some sections of the 2-day/week version of the course also require attendance at the second or third class to remain enrolled. See individual instructor for details. Students who are waitlisted must attend the first meeting of each section they are waitlisted for in order to secure a place in the course should space open up. It is the student's responsibility to notify respective OB 374 faculty of your attendance and wish to fulfill your waitlist requirement. PRE-QUALIFICATION: Students must pre-qualify before taking the class through an assignment on Canvas (due approximately five weeks prior to the quarter). Go to https://canvas.stanford.edu/enroll/H8WJ8X, then select "Enroll in Course". In addition to the Pre-Qualification assignment, you will also be asked to complete a Demographic Survey for each section in which you are enrolled or waitlisted. The survey(s) will be sent to you by email prior to the start of the quarter.

Power and influence processes are ubiquitous and important in organizations, so leaders need to be able both to understand power and to act on that knowledge. This course has three objectives: 1) increasing students' ability to diagnose and analyze power and politics in organizational situations; 2) increase students' skills in exercising power effectively; and 3) helping students come to terms with the inherent dilemmas and choices, and their own ambivalence, involved in developing and exercising influence. Topics covered include: the sources of power, including individual attributes and structural position; dealing with resistance and conflict; obtaining allies and supporters; maintaining power; how and why power is lost; living in the limelight--the price of having power--preparing oneself to obtain power; and the use of language and body language in exercising power. The class involves a reasonably large number of written, self-reflective assignments as well as one individual project--a doing power project using the class material during the quarter to build power in some group or organization. The class emphasis is on both learning the conceptual material and also incorporating it into one's own strategies and behaviors.

Conflict is unavoidable in every organization. The key question is how it will be handled: will it escalate to dysfunctional levels or will it be effectively managed? Hence, a first aim of the course is to develop your ability to analyze conflicts, to look beneath the surface rhetoric of a conflict, to isolate the important underlying interests, and to determine what sort of agreement (if any) is feasible. We'll analyze which negotiation strategies are effective in different conflicts. We'll also examine psychological and structural factors that create conflict and often pose a barrier to its resolution. But understanding how to analyze a conflict is not enough. To manage conflict effectively, you need a broad repertoire of behavioral skills. Developing these is the second aim of the course. To achieve this, negotiation exercises are used in every session. When playing a role in a simulated conflict, you will be free to try out tactics that might feel uncomfortable in a real one. You will get feedback from your classmates about how you come across. In sum, you can use this course to expand your repertoire of skills, to hone your skills, and to become more adept in choosing when to apply each skill.

This Bass Seminar and Experiential Workshop will examine what it means to live a life of consequence. Using theories and evidence from the latest and best research on happiness, meaning and success, we will collectively develop a conceptual framework for thinking about how you personally can design a happier and more meaningful life for yourself. In addition to building a solid conceptual foundation on which to think about your life, you will have substantial opportunities to work individually and in small groups on a variety of reflective and experiential exercises designed to stimulate your imagination regarding how to create greater happiness and meaning in your own life. These engaging and enjoyable exercises include personal writing and public speaking exercises, as well as out-of-class experiential exercises. The seminar will be very discussion oriented and student participation quite lively. The goal of this seminar and workshop is to change how you think about yourself and your life! THIS WORKSHOP IS AVAILABLE ONLY TO FIRST- AND SECOND- YEAR MBA STUDENTS at the GSB. NO EXCEPTIONS WILL BE PERMITTED AND AUDITING IS NOT PERMITTED.

The entertainment industry is of enormous importance - both from a business and cultural standpoint and has influence on virtually every spare of our society. It is characterized by tremendous opportunities and great uncertainties. The industry is continually changing as a result of emergent technology, new business models, and expanding markets. This dynamic industry creates opportunities for entrepreneurial students interested in leaving an artistic and/or creative imprint on the world. This course is designed to help prepare students for careers in the media industries, and to explore leadership within them. The industry is truly an intersection of art and commerce, and the major portion of the course will involve bringing to the class leaders who represent key areas of the entertainment industry, on both the business and creative sides. As with any business, the entertainment industry is driven by the vision of its leaders. These leaders make financial and artistic decisions daily, and manage staff and productions with the goal of producing entertainment product meant to be seen as widely as possible, and meant to make a profit. It is hoped that through interaction with these speakers, students will see the potential of strong leadership and how it works to advance entertainment companies and the films and television programming they produce. Topics to be examined include project development, production, marketing and distribution; emerging technologies and platforms, and their impact on the industry; the roles of studio, network and gaming executives, directors, producers, television showrunners, writers, actors, agents, talent managers, and others; and the intersection of Silicon Valley and Hollywood. The class will also cover the social changes occurring in the industry, such as the rise of #MeToo, and the importance of leaders creating workplaces and entertainment product that is inclusive and ethical. The theory behind this course is that by listening to, and questioning the class speakers, coupled with class research papers, students will emerge with a deeper understanding of the entertainment industry. The class is also intended to give students a view of first-rate leadership in general, and to present what it takes to be a successful, inspiring, and forward-thinking leader in entertainment.

In order to be effective in the emerging global economy, managers need to be able to interact effectively across cultures. This course will provide you with critical knowledge and skills that will enable you to become an effective global leader. After successfully completing this course, you will have enhanced cultural intelligence which will help you work more effectively across cultures. In particular, you will have an enhanced knowledge of: The multiple ways in which national cultures vary and factors that explain this variation. How culture affects basic psychological processes, including cognition, emotion, and motivation. How culture affects the communication process, including nonverbal and verbal communication. How culture affects leadership and followership. How culture affects the process of negotiating, and how to create win-win agreements across cultures. Ethical challenges that leaders face when doing business across cultures, and ways to deal with ethical conflicts across cultures. How culture affects the process of teamwork, and ways to build an effective global business team. The nature of human resource management practices across different cultural contexts, and the tension between standardizing HRM practices versus adapting HRM practices to the local context in multinational companies. Problems that expatriates may experience on their assignments, and ways to maximize the potential that expatriates will successfully adapt to the local context. This course will use a combination of lectures, group discussion, videos, and numerous case analyses.

Thinking about starting a company that might change the world? In this compressed course, we go beyond the standard texts of how to build a startup. We provide budding entrepreneurs the opportunity to learn from the real-world experiences of a remarkable collection of experienced entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. They have each succeeded in funding or launching businesses that have had a positive impact on millions of people. This is a chance for you to bring your own venture ideas to class and learn how to develop them.

Why do large, successful companies often have such difficulty in disrupting themselves (e.g., Kodak, Blockbuster, Borders)? How do you maintain an entrepreneurial edge within an existing enterprise? How do you sustain core businesses while simultaneously adapting to disruptive threats? In this course, students will build the skills to spot threats and opportunities earlier and capture them faster. The course will take a look at some of the most successful "creators within corporations" and discern why some strategies succeed when others do not. We will explore the framework that some companies have developed to simultaneously compete in their core business while exploring new ones. To do this we will interact with guests from firms like Walmart, Amazon, General Motors, Flex and IBM as well as venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Our objective is to help students understand in some detail what it takes to help organizations stay ahead of disruptive threats and to avoid problems that often lead companies into decline.

This course examines organization culture, how and why managers can use culture to maximize results within an organization, and how culture can undermine results. The course begins by situating cultural leadership and management within a culture-shaping framework and the opportunities, obligations and methods for leaders to impact culture. It also focuses on what is different in cultural management and why so many contemporary firms attempt to use it. We analyze the relationship between culture and strategy, seeking alignment between the two. The course also explores different kinds of cultures seen in high performing and low performing organizations, and seeks to understand how cultural content affects behavior and business results. Students will be asked to describe and define the culture of an organization needed for a given business and strategy, and to define the role of executives in shaping culture. The class identifies and analyzes the tools or levers that leaders can use to build an effective culture. We will spend a session on each of the following: culture and strategy alignment, architecture for shaping culture, selecting people for cultural alignment, aligning organizational practices, culture and society, cultural inflection points from start-up to scale, cultural aspects of high performance and cultural diagnostics. The course will end with a session on culture issues in merger and acquisition.

In 2009 a student who was about to graduate said to me, "Being coached at the GSB helped me grow over the last two years, but after I leave school and no longer have access to these resources, how will I continue to coach myself?" This course is an attempt to help you answer that question. I define self-coaching as the process of guiding our own growth and development, particularly through periods of transition, in both the professional and personal realms. In this course you'll explore a range of practices and disciplines intended to help you build on what you've learned about yourself at the GSB and continue that process after graduation. Classes will consist of a mix of short lectures, exercises, small group discussions, and conversations in pairs. While this is a self-directed process, it's also highly social and interactive. You'll work with in pairs and small groups in every class session, so be prepared to discuss meaningful personal issues with your fellow students. Because every class session involves extensive interaction with other students, missing a class would negatively affect other students' learning. As a result, your are obligated to attend every class session. One unexcused absence will lower your grade a full level, and more than one unexcused absence will result in a U. For students taking the class Pass/Fail, an unexcused absence may result in a failing grade.

How do we address racial bias and inequities? What role do institutions play in creating, maintaining, and magnifying those inequities? What role do we play? In this elective, we examine racial bias and inequality in our criminal justice system and in our neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. In every domain, we focus our attention on the tools and interventions that can be used to mitigate bias and decrease racial disparities. The format will be highly interactive, including guest speakers and student group presentations. Grading will be based on course preparation, active participation, two reaction papers, and a final paper. Attendance is mandatory. Because each day constitutes 20% of the course, even one unexcused absence can have a substantial impact on course grade. Enrollment is limited.

This course combines insights from psychological research and theater practice to explore how power and status play a role in most social and professional interactions. Exercises drawn from actor training will illustrate how power is decoded and performed, while lectures from organizational behavior highlight the most relevant conceptual frameworks and empirical findings. Then, coached by theater professionals, students will prepare and present scenes from actual plays, as well as roleplay situations they have found especially challenging to experiment with new ways of showing up. In the process, this course will allow students to explore their comfort with playing high vs. low power, to consider the associations they have with power, and to question the potential tension between behaving authentically and acting in ways that best serve their group and values.

Getting from "strategic insight" to "desired outcome" (achieving the right result) continues to be a core challenge for many organizations and leaders. In this course, we develop a framework and approach for the "insight to outcome" sequence, study some of the key levers available to managers, and learn from some common pitfalls. The bulk of the course will be devoted to the practical application of the approach to a number of important business processes, such as merger integration, corporate and business unit transformation, and strategy development. Some class sessions will involve class visits by topical experts in these applications. This course will appeal to students interested in an exploratory course - more of a "how to think about it" course than a "toolkit" course. Grades will be based on class participation and a group project. Class size is limited to 40.

This course is designed to improve students' skills in all phases of a negotiation: understanding prescriptive and descriptive negotiation theory as it applies to dyadic and multiparty negotiations, to buyer-seller transactions and the resolution of disputes, to the development of negotiation strategy and to the management of integrative and distributive aspects of the negotiation process. The course is based on a series of simulated negotiations in a variety of contexts including one-on-one, multi-party, and team negotiations. When playing a role in a simulated conflict, you will be free to try out tactics that might feel uncomfortable in a real one. You will get feedback from your classmates about how you come across. You will have an opportunity to reflect on your experience in your negotiation paper. In sum, you can use this course to expand your repertoire of conflict management and negotiation skills, to hone your skills, and to become more adept in choosing when to apply each skill. This course represents a shorter, more intense version of OB 381-Conflict Management and Negotiations. Students should not take both courses, as there is considerable overlap in course content. Attendance and participation in the negotiation exercises is mandatory.

This seminar will explore the ways in which conscious and unconscious bias impacts the careers of underrepresented minority, LGBTQ, and women academics. We will study topics such as unconscious bias, stereotype threat, ambient belonging, microaggressions, and everyday racism with a lens toward understanding how these impact academics. We will also consider ways to confront bias so that we can design a more equitable and diverse academe for the future.

The careers of individuals are shaped by their movement within and between organizations, whether those be established employers or entrepreneurial ventures. Conversely, organizations of all sizes are shaped by the flows of individuals through them as individuals construct careers by pursuing different opportunities. This course will examine sociological and economic theory and research on this mutually constitutive relationship. Possible topics include inequality and attainment processes, internal labor markets, mobility dynamics, individual and organizational learning, ecological influences, gender and racial segregation, discrimination, and entrepreneurship as a career process.

Thinking in terms of networks is a powerful way to bridge the theoretical and empirical gap between micro-contexts and macro-patterns, in both directions. For example, an organizational culture emerges through interactions of individuals within the formal and informal social networks of the organization. But once established, such a culture can determine the nature of interactions between individuals. Theories of social capital, influence, power and relational sociology speak to these types of problems; social network analysis provides tools to approach them rigorously. This course will have four modules designed to make you a confident creator and skeptical consumer of social network research. We'll start with definitions and fundamental results from graph theory. We'll then situate social networks within sociological (and adjacent) theory before covering some approaches for (and challenges of) collecting and working with empirical network data. Finally, we'll discuss contemporary research around social networks within organizational contexts and future directions.

This course reviews social science research on the role of organizations in environmental sustainability. Modern human activity is known to be dramatically changing the earth's ecosystem with far-reaching consequences: altering the climate, reducing biodiversity, challenging our ability to provide sufficient food and water, increasing mass migrations, harming our oceans, threatening human health, and potentially leading to increasing violence and chances of war. Our ability to limit and adapt to these changes will depend on the behavior of organizations: corporations, not for profits, governments, non-governmental organizations, political advocacy and social movement organizations. The course organizes the various literatures of "organization theory" that pertain to sustainability, giving the students an intellectual structure on which to build their own understanding. The course is intended for PhD students planning to pursue a career as researchers in academia or industry. It is offered jointly at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

This seminar will explore how people think, feel, and act in interactive decision making situations. Topics of discussion will include strategic thinking and choice, social influence, bargaining games, social dilemmas, negotiation, conflict management, and dispute resolution, among other topics. We will discuss intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup processes related to interactive decision making, and read research from multiple disciplines, including cognitive and social psychology, behavioral economics, management, and more. This course is intended for PhD students who wish to think together about theoretical ideas, methodology, and empirical findings related to interactive decision making, and develop research projects in this field.

Why are some organizations more competitive than others? This is the defining questions of the interdisciplinary research field known as 'strategic management.' In this PhD seminar, we will survey the field of strategic management as seen from the perspective of 'macro' organizational behavior. The course takes a broad view of the field of strategic management, reflecting the diversity of perspectives that is seen in this field worldwide. Across this diversity, however, it is possible to identify four distinct theoretical approaches by noting the mechanisms that researchers think are generating outcomes. The course is structured around these four theoretical approaches, and one of the main objectives of the course is to help you identify, critique, and improve these theoretical approaches. Most work in strategic management pays less attention to particular theoretical perspectives, and is organized more by the topic - the phenomenon being studied - such as market exit, growth, performance, mergers and acquisitions, innovation, and the like. I have catalogued the research in strategic management both according to theoretical perspective and topic, and the skeleton of that structure can be seen in this syllabus. I encourage you to use a similar structure as you try to make sense out of the strategy field.

This course covers research and theory on the origins and function of social norms. Topics include the estimation of public opinion, the function of norms as ideals and standards of judgment, and the impact of norms on collective and individual behavior. In addition to acquainting students with the various forms and functions of social norms the course will provide students with experience in identifying and formulating tractable research questions.

Social movement activists frequently target organizations (e.g., corporations, universities) in order to bring about political and social change. Because most organizations are not democracies, movements must find ways to penetrate their closed boundaries if they are to have an influence inside organizations. At the same time, social movements create organizational structures that help them carry out their goals, reproduce their missions and tactics, and effectively generate collective action. The purpose of this course is to examine the complex relationship between social movements and organizations. In order to understand the empirical link between movements and organizations, we will rely on social movement and organizational theory. Like the phenomena they seek to explain, these theories are strongly intertwined. In this course, we will cover topics related to how movements use organizations to propel change, and topics related to how movements help generate social change by targeting organizations. We will also evaluate the theoretical developments at the nexus of these two literatures, identifying the major innovations as well as looking for new research opportunities.

This PhD course provides an overview of economic sociology as it pertains to the behavior of individuals as atomistic agents and collective actors, in the context of markets and organizations. Students will study foundational texts as well as recent research in order to gain an understanding of how to further advance the field. Topics include networks, categories, labor markets, product markets, inequality, and others. Throughout the course students will be expected to generate "mental maps" to demonstrate they have gained a comprehensive understanding of the field, weekly memos, and to complete a final project.

What is culture, and how can we model it? This course will survey theoretical frameworks for studying culture from a multidisciplinary perspective, ranging from evolutionary biology through sociology to economics. We will explore various methods for measuring culture and modeling cultural processes, including ethnography and survey data. Our focus, however, will be on measurement and modeling strategies that are made possible by the internet revolution and big data, including agent-based modeling, natural language processing and machine learning. Our class discussions will transition between theoretical abstraction and hands-on data analysis.

This pro-seminar is primarily for OB PhD students who are developing dissertation ideas. The pro-seminar covers the main research areas of OB faculty and aims to help students develop their theoretical ideas for their dissertation research. OB PhD students are required to take the pro-seminar in all years prior to the approval of their dissertation proposal.

This course will focus on psychological processes that occur within individuals that cannot be seen but whose existence can be inferred on the basis of people's behavior. Such processes, referred to as individual processes, include personality, emotions, perception, and learning. This course aims to introduce Ph.D. students to both theoretical and applied background on individual processes, with a special emphasis on person vs situation and nature vs nurture debates, evolutionary perspective, and free will. Additionally, we will discuss psychological assessment and its principles, and review both traditional (e.g., tests and questionnaires) and modern (e.g., digital behavioral footprints) approaches to collecting data and measuring psychological constructs.

The primary objective of this course is to provide an overview and organizing framework of the micro-organizational behavior literature. This entails reading many foundational pieces that will cover the classic areas of research in the field. We will also read more cutting-edge papers that reanalyze and reframe many of the classic variables of micro-OB, trying to alter the dominant perspective, bring in new theory, and integrate conflicting approaches.

This is a course in the design of social research, with a particular emphasis on research field (i.e., non-laboratory) settings. As such, the course is a forum for discussing and developing an understanding of the different strategies social theorists employ to explain social processes, develop theories, and make these theories as believable as possible. In general, these issues will be discussed in the context of sociological research on organizations, but this will not be the exclusive focus of the course. A range of topics will be covered, for example: formulating and motivating research questions; varieties of explanation; experimental and quasi-experimental methods, including natural experiments; counterfactual models; conceptualization and measurement; sampling and case selection; qualitative and quantitative approaches. This course is particularly oriented toward developing an appreciation of the tradeoffs of different approaches. It is well suited to Ph.D. students working on qualifying papers and dissertation proposals.

This seminar considers the leading sociological approaches to analyzing relations of organizations and environments, with a special emphasis on dynamics. Attention is given to theoretical formulations, research designs, and results of empirical studies. Prerequisite: Enrollment in a PhD program. Also listed as Sociology 362.

Dawn of the Machines: Behavioral Approaches to Artificial Intelligence. In Spring 2022, this seminar will explore how psychologists and micro-OB scholars can engage with the emergence of AI. Noting that the treatment of AI varies widely in behavioral research (as a social phenomenon, a target of judgment, a statistical tool, a model for humans, etc.), we will discuss recent papers and identify opportunities for research. No lecturing. Instruction is based entirely on reading and discussing published papers. Prerequisites: Requires no technical expertise in AI or programming, but familiarity with social psychological concepts and methods is needed. Enrollment in a PhD Program required. Cannot be audited or taken Pass/Fail.

This course helps students gain foundational knowledge on several different methods used in micro-OB research, including surveys, experiments (field and lab), longitudinal studies, content analysis, qualitative interviews, ethnography, cases, and archival datasets. The course will cover the benefits and limitations of each method, and how to creatively mix and match methods to address ambitious research questions.

This year-long course takes a hands-on approach to learning about experimental research. It will cover the entire process of experimental research from idea and hypothesis generation to study design, analysis, and publication. The topical content will be customized to the specific interests of the enrolled students, but generally will be concerned with questions about behavioral phenomena in organizational contexts.

The course will focus on the Behavioral Theory of the Firm and the contemporary research areas it influences, especially research on organization design. The course will introduce students to an active research area whose scholars have largely been inspired by the late Jim March. We will study the basic elements of behavioral approaches to organizations and consider how new contributions can be made in this area. The course will also give students opportunities to familiarize themselves with agent-based modelling, which has been one of the preferred methods of behavioral theorists. Students will be able to discuss papers based on such models, but also develop simple models to formalize theoretical arguments.

This course covers theories and methods used in research on individual and group creativity. Several different approaches to studying creativity will be discussed, ranging from small-scale experiments to large-scale datasets. The goal is for students to come away with an understanding of the scholarly literature on creativity, as well as actionable tools for conducting their own research on creativity and related concepts.

In this class, you will learn how to effectively combine qualitative research methods, including ethnographic observation and interviews, with experimental methods, including lab, natural and field experiments, to investigate questions of interest in the study of work, organizations and markets.

The goal of this practicum is to integrate methods from natural language processing with social psychological perspectives on race to build practical systems that address significant societal issues. Readings will be drawn broadly from across the social sciences and computer science. Students will work with large, complex datasets and participate in research involving community partnerships relevant to race and natural language processing. Prerequisite: CS224N, PSYCH290, or equivalent background in natural language processing. Students interested in participating should complete the online application for permission. Limited enrollment.

This course is offered for students requiring specialized training in an area not covered by existing courses. To register, a student must obtain permission from the faculty member who is willing to supervise the reading.

This course is elected as soon as a student is ready to begin research for the dissertation, usually shortly after admission to candidacy. To register, a student must obtain permission from the faculty member who is willing to supervise the research.

Doctoral Practicum in Teaching

Doctoral Practicum in Research