printer friendly pageOB 110N: Savvy: Learning How to Communicate with Purpose
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. nnIn 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. nnAfter 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.
Last offered: Spring 2017
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
OB 115N: Games, Decisions and Negotiations
Human thinking is geared toward understanding and mastering social interactions.
OB 115N explores cognitive, affective, behavioral, social and organizational processes that shape how we manage strategic interactions. The course builds on concepts and research findings from decision theory, behavioral game theory, negotiation research, and other relevant streams of investigation in the social sciences. By the end of this course, participants should have a better understanding of the structural and psychological factors that underlie competition and cooperation, bargaining, contracting, social influence, dispute resolution, and other types of social and organizational interactions. In addition to understanding how to analyze human thinking, feeling, and action in interactive contexts, participants will have opportunities to develop their behavioral skills through in-class exercises and simulations. Participants will play assigned roles in simulated interactions that will allow them to try out tactics that might feel uncomfortable trying in actual situations, get constructive feedback from other participants, and learn how they come across. The course readings, which are aimed to complement the in-class exercises, debriefs, and discussions, are aimed to further stimulate participants' interest in human cognition, emotion, and behavior in interactive contexts.To understand how decisions happen, we will use a combination of experiential exercises in class and in-depth discussions of theory and new and exciting research findings on cognitive and emotional aspects of decision making (e.g., what does "bounded-rationality" mean? how does power shape our negotiation behavior? how do our emotions influence our decisions?). We will play interactive games in our meetings to understand how various conditions, such as time pressure, power and uncertainty, influence our decisions. So, if you enjoy in-class exercises, you will enjoy our simulations. At the same time, if you enjoy analyzing human behavior and social interactions, you will like the readings and our discussions. After taking this course, you will be better able to identify and avoid common traps in strategic decision making and have a deeper understanding of other people's thinking and decision making processes.
Last offered: Winter 2018
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
OB 205: Managing Groups and Teams
This course introduces you to the structures and processes that affect group performance and highlights some of the common pitfalls associated with working in teams. Topics include team culture, fostering creativity and coordination, making group decisions, and dealing with a variety of personalities. You will participate in a number of group 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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 1
OB 206: Organizational Behavior
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2
Instructors:
Flynn, F. (PI)
;
Kosinski, M. (PI)
OB 209: Leadership Laboratory
In the Leadership Labs class we ask you to consider the question, "Why would someone 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 lead 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 will have the opportunity to try out new skills and tools. Students will be placed into 5-6 person "squads" and the majority of class time will be spent in these squads. Your squad will meet to work on basic leadership challenges (e.g. managing conflict, assessing a team's progress). There will be the opportunity for a lot of feedback so you can achieve a deeper understanding of the impact of your behavior on others. The squads will do role-play cases and group exercises designed to help you think more deeply about the dynamics in your workgroup and to allow you to practice and experiment with new ways of leading. Each session will be divided into two segments, and one squad member will be the leader for each segment. MBA1 squad members will rotate through the segment leader position. Your squad will have an MBA2 Leadership Fellow assigned to it and he or she will also be present for these meetings in order to provide coaching to the leader and to the squad as whole. Over the course of the quarter your squad will work together on the group project for your Strategy Class. While the deliverable on this project is for your Strategy class, the experience of working together as a team provides a rich opportunity for learning about peer leadership. A number of activities in the weekly Lab will be focused on assessing and reflecting on how you are working together in both the Labs and on your Strategy project. Finally, the quarter culminates with the Executive Challenge. The Executive Challenge will be 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 provide you feedback and evaluate your performance.Other course details:Number of group projects/papers: 1 (The squad will work together on a group project for their Strategy course). They will have a few meetings related to this group project during lab time. However, the Strategy group project will be graded by the Strategy faculty and count toward the Strategy course grade (not the Leadership Labs grade).Number of individual projects/papers: 1 final paper (in addition, students will submit short descriptions of their learning goals two times during the quarter). Grade distribution:10% participation in the Executive Challenge; 25% class participation; 35% projects/papers; 30% peer evaluation
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2
Instructors:
Carmel-Hurwitz, D. (PI)
;
Corney, A. (PI)
;
Cronkite, J. (PI)
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more instructors for OB 209 »
Instructors:
Carmel-Hurwitz, D. (PI)
;
Corney, A. (PI)
;
Cronkite, J. (PI)
;
Dobbs, C. (PI)
;
Keelan, H. (PI)
;
Monzon, L. (PI)
;
Miller, D. (SI)
OB 219: MSx: Organizational Design
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.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 2
Instructors:
Sterling, A. (PI)
OB 289: MSx: Negotiations
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, a first aim of the course is to develop your ability to analyze conflicts. 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 conflict. In addition to understanding how to analyze a conflict, to manage conflict effectively, you must have a broad repertoire of behavioral skills that can be applied to the various conflict 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 conflict. Our exercises will allow you to try out tactics that might feel uncomfortable trying in an actual conflict, get constructive feedback from your counterparts and classmates, and learn how you come across. This course is an intense, compact version 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.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 2
Instructors:
Halevy, N. (PI)
OB 310: Org 2.0: The Analytics of Organization Design
This course will show you how to deploy analytics to find better solutions for a broad range of design issues, ranging from employee selection and retention to organizational structure and even organizational culture. You will cover a range of analytical techniques with broad applicability (machine learning, network analysis, and agent-based models for example). The suite of new ideas that characterize "Org2.0" represents a major departure from the mainstream approach to organization design, which relies extensively on copying "best practices" from other companies, represents organizations as "boxes and arrows" organization charts, and is typically obsessed with incentive compensation and reporting as the key organizational/HR decisions. In Org2.0, you will learn how to use analytics to find out what works specifically for your company (rather than what worked in others), develop detailed models of interactions among employees (rather than among boxes) to help them collaborate successfully, and think of organization design as a combination of factors which can all be better understood through analytics. This is a hands-on class: it will rely extensively on group exercises, in which you will be able to learn enough about analytical tools and programming to be able to collaborate with analysts and evaluate their work. You will also have the chance to interact with industry speakers who have been applying these techniques in practice. A great aspect of the course is that it will bring you value regardless of how much you already know about analytics or statistics: practical exercises will familiarize you with how analytical techniques are implemented, and class discussions will enable those already familiar to contribute to others and expand their own knowledge. What you learn in the class will be an asset to you in a wide range of jobs linked to strategy execution, post-merger integration, re-organizations and human resources, regardless of how big or small your company is.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
Instructors:
Clement, J. (PI)
OB 317: Leading Creativity and Innovation
This course helps students become more effective leaders of creativity and innovation in organizations. Successful innovations begin as creative ideas, but creative ideas can be difficult to generate and accurately evaluate. Based on the latest research, this course teaches students a set of data-driven tools for generating creative ideas, forecasting which ideas are most likely to succeed, and implementing new ideas successfully. Through experiential exercises, students learn about their own personal strengths in developing and evaluating new ideas, and how to leverage the strengths of individuals, teams, and crowds to foster creativity and innovation in their organizations.
Last offered: Spring 2018
OB 324: The Psychology of Startup Teams
9 out of 10 start-up teams fail. The majority of these failures lie not in the product or in the market, but rather in the people dynamics within the start-up team. This course focuses on how start-ups can manage these problems and challenges that arise in the people-side of start-up life. We explore the psychological dynamics specific to startup teams and identify ways to effectively lead startup teams to their optimal performance. We will discuss topics such as creating the 'dream team', leadership in start-ups, the art of vision in startups, managing a startup's culture and climate, navigating virtual interactions, and solving common interpersonal problems in startup teams. To address these topics, the course will use a mix of experiential exercises, cases, and exciting guest speakers (including well-known CEOs and venture capitalists).
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
Instructors:
Greer, L. (PI)
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