- Your customers are becoming more connected, vocal and powerful.
- Developments in the emerging economies present both threat and opportunity. You cannot stand still.
- The impacts of demographic, technological and environmental trends are beginning to bite.
- The business is now more socially complex and distributed; integrating across organisational and cultural boundaries is challenging.
You are a senior executive. You are soon to be responsible for a strategic project, something that is going to happen anyway. The consequences of failure or success will be significant for you. You would appreciate an outside perspective from listening to the research, mentors, and peers from within your own industry and in others.
Perhaps you have just taken on a new operational role. You know there are more effective and rewarding ways of doing things. You want to influence the current performance culture to reflect your values. How do you go about realising your vision for change?
Or maybe you are curious to learn how others are using social technologies to create business value and to explore possibilities for your own business.
Whatever your immediate business pressures, pain points and motivation, you urgently need the business to become more agile, effective and high-performing.
High Performance in the Digital Age
You will take away knowledge, experiences and skills that will help you to work effectively within increasingly fast-moving, complex and uncertain operating conditions. This will benefit you, your colleagues and the business.
And you will learn together with and from others who, like yourself, are willing to challenge themselves through the PG Certificate programme. Here are just some of the things that you will take away:
Knowledge
There is an accumulation of research evidence on high-performance work systems. Three things are clear from the research - that they are good for business, that they lead to more a satisfying experience of work, and that they are not widespread in practice. Why is this, when they are so consistently associated with a range of business benefits and are good for people?
You will learn about high-performance work systems and the principles underpinning their design. You will also learn to interpret and apply the research. What does high-performance look like for your business? What is likely to help or hinder high performance in practice - for you and for your colleagues? What can you do to put in place high-performance systems and working practices in your business? How can you overcome obstacles?
You will also learn about the business value of social technologies, which includes using them in practice. According to McKinsey "these technologies, which create value by improving productivity across the value chain, could potentially contribute $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in annual value". This is across the four industrial sectors that they analysed. In common other experts, from IBM for example, they say this will not happen unless structures, processes and cultures are transformed. These structures, processes and cultures are precisely those that are associated with high-performance systems and working practices.
High performance is also an outcome of employee involvment, engagement, participation and informal social relationships (where most learning happens, as well as social support). Social technologies have a crucial role to play in connecting people with and across their social networks.
Develop MBA-level skills
You will learn to make decisions within complex situations, to think and act critically, to ask questions and to challenge the status quo. These are exactly the skills that global Chief Executives are saying are essential for rapidly changing, highly uncertain and connected global business conditions.
Get your learning recognised
Let's face it, state-of-the art learning is not happening in books or business schools. It is happening at the sharp end, within businesses facing unprecedented pressures from multiple directions. MBA-level learning is routinely taking place in workplaces and is going unrecognised. This is your chance to practice, develop and improve your skills - and earn formal recognition through the Post-gardauate Certificate.
Opportunity to step back
The programme gives you the the opportunity to put aside time to talk and reflect with others. The insights that you are likely to gain from different industries will give you a fresh prespective on your own business problem.
Support network
You will experience the value of learning within a community: discovering, sharing, debating, challenging, questioning and laughing together. It is likely that you will recognise the challenges that each of you faces within your different businesses. Making changes to the way things are done in the workplace typically means challenging the status quo and requires courage. It is likely that your colleagues on the programme will become a strong support network.
The Programme
Learning through the programme is a by-product of doing a practical project and reflecting on the outcomes. You’ll work with your programme facilitator to develop a portfolio of evidence of learning. This will consist of things you produce through your work, which will reveal that you have engaged with the module content and incorporated your thoughts and reflections into the artefacts.
How does the module content come into it? You critique it, reject it, or adapt it and use it according to how it will help you practically. Justifying what you do with content, sources and resources suggested in the modules and resources that you discover, is part of how you gain academic credit.
A total of 60 academic credits are awarded in three modules of 20 credits.
The Project
So long as the project you choose can be shown to have the potential for learning at Master’s level – and this will be assessed in conversation with a facilitator – you can develop a portfolio of evidence of learning from project activities to gain formal academic recognition. The aim of your project will be:
- Identify an existing value-creating process that you think could be done better or differently. Propose and scope something you want to change or introduce.
- Use social technologies where feasible engage key stakeholders to explore the potential and feasibility of the proposed change project.
- Engage key stakeholders, again using social technologies where feasible, to evaluate the performance environment (including structures, culture and workplace) – how might this have to change? How does the existing performance environment help or hinder? Propose and pilot an implementation strategy.
The Modules
1. The principles of business process dynamics
You’ll explore organisations as inter-linked systems and look at processes as networks of dynamic social relationships, and learn how these combine to create business value.
2. The business value of social technologies
This module builds on the first module to show how social technologies can extend knowledge flows and increase the potential for innovation, collaboration and integration.
3. Creating high-performance work systems