Finance, Analysis and Modeling

Financial literacy is a core competency for any business leader. The ability to know your numbers is essential whether you are running your own small business/startup or whether you are working in a large organisation. This unit offers a solid financial accounting and management accounting grounding to students. This knowledge allows students to understand the financial opportunities and challenges inherent in any business endeavor. Students will subsequently better understand the position and performance of initiatives undertaken in the context of the broader strategies and objectives of an organisation. Such an understanding will help students make critical cost beneficial trade-offs.

All managers must have a basic understanding of financial management concepts, capital markets and instruments, as well as the trade-offs between financial risk versus gain. This unit provides students with the understanding of the tools and techniques in financial management. The main goal is to prepare students for responsible and sustainable leadership using the financial management perspective. The unit develops a framework around financial analysis and modeling, as well as business, risk, and investment evaluation by focusing on four main areas: (1) the assessment of an organisation’s financial health, (2) the planning of the organisation’s future financial performance, (3) the financing of the organisation’s operations, and (4) the evaluation of business and investment opportunities for the organisation. Emphasis is placed on the application of tools and techniques to real world problems in financial management to enable students to solve related problems in their workplace.

This unit introduces students to a range of analytical tools and skills to understand, analyse and evaluate challenges and opportunities that organisations are facing today. Students will examine a range of environmental, social and economic drivers of megatrends (associated with technological, socio-cultural, political, economic and ecological forces) influencing organisations, industry sectors and societies. They will explore how these changes/trends can be addressed through sustainability-oriented innovative approaches. Students will become familiar with systems thinking, multi-level perspectives and multidisciplinary methods for envisioning futures, and will apply these to specific problems. The unit focuses on developing students' analytical skills, such as research, critical thinking, scanning, pattern recognition and creative problem solving. An emphasis on future-proofing skills such as the ability to work in teams, to collaborate with multiple stakeholders with diverse needs, and to account for judgements made within ethical decision making frameworks will also be covered.

This unit helps students understand the customer and the value they add to an organisation as well as how an organisation can benefit a customer. It introduces theories and techniques of marketing analytics in the context of various marketing decision-making environments. Students will explore the nature and role of digital and social marketing for generating customer value. The unit will introduce students to customer analytics and methods of segmentation to determine a customer's lifetime value to an organisation. Topics are reinforced by the use of actual marketplace data and analytics to measure and estimate the effects of an organisation's marketing effort.