Programme Calendar & Curriculum

Calendar

The SMU EMBA Programme is specially designed to complement the busy schedules of global senior leaders like you. Conducted modularly over 8 segments in 12 months (over 2 calendar years, e.g. August 2023 to August 2024), please click HERE to download a detailed version of the 2023 intake programme calendar.

Programme format

Besides structuring our Programme to minimise disruption to your work and personal pursuits, we have packaged its format to be rigorous and challenging, while giving you ample opportunity to network and develop peer relationships.

You will embark on the Programme with orientation, teambuilding and the commencement of classes packed into the first 7-day Singapore segment. Thereafter, you will attend the overseas and Singapore segments, 6 days each (Monday to Saturday). This format was decided after in-depth consultation with a broad range of stakeholders to determine an optimal design.

Daytime sessions will be a mix of classroom teaching and industry visits, while evenings may be used for guest lectures, projects, group work and networking sessions.

Typical Daily Schedule During Residential Segments:

0830- 1000Session 1
1000 - 1015Break
1015 - 1200Session 2
1200 - 1300Lunch
1300 - 1430Session 3
1430 - 1445Break
1445 - 1630Session 4
1630 - 1900Briefing sessions/talks/project work/networking sessions

Strategic Initiative Project

The Strategic Initiative Project (SIP) will challenge student to learn through immersion in a real problem. Students will play an active role of a problem-solver confronted with an ill-structured authentic situation that simulates the problem that you are likely to face as a manager in a complex organisational environment.

Through the 12-month SIP, students will form teams of 5 - 6 students and together will faculty guidance, they will learn how to develop problem solving strategies and sector-knowledge bases and skills. 

SIP represents an educational paradigm shift; where the focus lies in the impartation through learning rather than teaching. Learning in this module takes place within the context of currently occuring tasks, issues, and problems, and authentically represents real-world concerns. 

Distinctive Curriculum

While having a global perspective is important, it is imperative for you to synthesise your perspective into a vision that can be articulated and communicated with clarity that will inspire and propel your organisation forward.

Leading In A Global Environment: Corporate leaders are constantly challenged to sustain business growth, manage associates, and inspire passion in the face of adversity. This course presents the invaluable opportunity to take stock of your leadership qualities and develop a clear personal leadership action plan to enhance your individual, team and organisational effectiveness. Be empowered to take charge as a high-performance leader through the self-awareness exercises, case studies of successful leaders and recent leadership research.

Corporate Strategy In A Global Environment: This module considers the encompassing strategy of the firm and the synergies between different divisions. You will analyse the mega-trends of dynamic forces driving globalisation, how they shape competition, and the critical role of strategy in successfully operationalising your organisational processes.

You will learn how to employ tools and frameworks to assess the global dynamics of industries, with a specific focus on how resource availability and the macro-environmental constraints of a region affect operational strategy and corporate governance.

Having the attributes of a keenness in business sense and a solid internal compass are critical to sustainability. Tomorrow's leaders, like todays, will need to sharpen their edges in these attributes in order that their organisations continue to experience a long-term trajectory of success.

Managerial Economics: Investigate the principles of economic decision making with elementary tools from probability theory. This module lays the foundation for your subsequent coursework in finance. Topics include product pricing, the distinction between marginal and average revenue, and risk-adjusted rates of return.

Corporate Finance: Learn to select and finance the right investment opportunities with modern techniques of portfolio theory that enable you to appropriately value your organisational assets. The motivation and implications of corporate events such as recapitalisations, public offerings, leveraged buyouts, equity spinoffs, mergers & acquisitions (M&As) will also be examined.

Financial Reporting & Analysis: This module provides students with an overview of the various elements involved in financial statements, from the point of view of the shareholder. It covers the measurement of assets and liabilities and the recognition of income and expenses as well as managerial techniques for analysing financial statements.

Corporate Governance & Ethics: While being ethical cannot determine business success, acting unethically would inevitably lead to business failure. Ethics and social responsibility are therefore critical to businesses in today's corporate world. This module aims to create an understanding of how and why the reputation and success of organisations are increasingly and intricately linked to the level of ethical conduct, social responsibility and accountability to stakeholders. It also examines the ways that society and governments expect corporations to behave - with regard to ethics and social responsibility.

For organisations to continue their growth stories, it is imperative to extend their reach beyond familiar shores to cultivate markets that may not be apparent today.

Political Economy: Global & Regional: This module aims to provide leaders with conceptual tools and frameworks that allow systematic thinking about environmental factors that lead to the restructuring of companies, industries, competitive balance and countries. Discover tools used for analysing countries, systems, trends, stakeholders, scenario developments, regional competitive impact, investment risk and potential return assessment. The objective of this module is to resource you with the toolkit to assess potential shifts in stakeholder power within an industry or country, and suggest appropriate responses to these changes.

Contemporary Issues In Asian Business: Regional and global leaders often find it challenging to bridge across different borders, economies, legal systems and cultures of Asia. This module will present dimensions of culture, politics, and economics as well as a host of other elements with the aim of transforming you into an effective cross-cultural manager, leader and negotiator.

Change is the only constant in life. Successful firms are those that recognise the need to evolve with the changing tides and times. The challenge for leaders in the global economy’s state of flux would be to dynamically bring about meaningful and useful change that would retain an organisation’s growth through time. As Asia’s growth story begins to take centre stage, change management has become more important than ever before.

Innovation & Growth Management: The focus of this module is to provide you an in-depth exposure to the process of starting and scaling an enterprise from ideation and the development stage into the establishment of a company. You will develop a startup idea by formulating and executing a research project, assess and validate market opportunities, develop an actionable business plan and pitch to investors. In addition, you will also learn how to establish the right management team for the new enterprise. This class will also expose you to utilising integrative entrepreneurial execution in a variety of career and work contexts.

Negotiating in Business: This highly interactive course will focus on the dynamics of negotiation and building personal and organisational negotiation capacity. You will learn various negotiation techniques, how to design deals that create value and optimal agreement, think and act strategically in team and muiltparty negotiations, understand the universal principles of persuasion, and learn to influence your counterpart negotiators from different cultures effectively. Besides learning how to manage and resolve, you will also learn how to employ mediation as a widely used and practical resource in dealing with conflicts.

An organisation's culture, strategy and processes come together synergistically to ensure its success in the long term. It is therefore critical that you build sustainable, viable, trackable and repeatable processes, policies and procedures to implement your vision.

Operations Management: This module focuses on how an organisation can efficiently and effectively maximise the employment of its resources. You will study the importance of integrating your suppliers, vendors and customers as part of your internal processes. You will also learn about the use of technology, process management and change management as an integral part of your organisation's success.

Strategic Marketing Management: This module will impart an understanding of strategic marketing by addressing key challenges associated with aligning marketing activities with corporate strategy. You will learn frameworks, concepts and tools necessary to ensure that your organisation is focused on the appropriate and measurable activities that drive business results. You will also explore strategic opportunities and threats associated with the management of customer relationships.

Executing Strategy: Executing a strategy is multi-pronged, often complex and intricately interwoven with various functions of an organisation and also its external environment. This module will discuss the strategic planning process, with an emphasis on the steps you must take to ensure a strategy is planned, communicated and executed with finesse to deliver the intended results.

Speaker Series On Corporate Social Responsibility: There is an increasing interest in Corporate Social Responsibility as more companies embrace it as part of their corporate strategy, while redirecting resources away from traditional advertising towards social responsibility campaigns. Social responsibility is embraced by firms in a broad spectrum of ways ranging from ad hoc activities, to strategic partnerships and business model integration. This speaker series on Corporate Social Responsibility will host thought leaders who will help you uncover issues in this ambit and address them in the Asian context.

Given the limited resources and yet ever-increasing demands on leaders to grow their enterprises, your ability to harness and marshall resources becomes even more important in the face of competing organisational needs. It is therefore essential for you to know how to acquire, develop, manage and retain resources as part of your leadership repertoire.

Network & Alliance Building: Inter-organisational relationships and cooperative business ventures are central to competitive strategy as firms endeavour to attain outcomes from partnerships that they cannot attain individually. Consequentially, the study and execution of alliance strategies is of distinct value to the modern firm. This module examines what alliances are, why companies use them, how they are designed and managed, and what effects the spread of cooperation has had on competition.

Raising Capital & Resource Management: As part of this module, you will discover the decision frameworks financial professionals use to construct a company's optimal capital structure. In addition, to obtaining a thorough understanding of the strategic considerations involved in raising funds for investments, you will also learn how capital structure decisions at the company level influence project decisions at the departmental level. This module will explain how characteristics of capital markets impact the process and prospects of raising capital and help you gain a comprehensive understanding of corporate restructuring, mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcy. The enterprise resource management component of this module will provide you an overview of how resources can be better managed to satisfy customers' needs through the integration of business operations.

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Speak to our Admissions Advisors

Lee Kong Chian School of Business
Postgraduate Admissions

Singapore Management University,
SMU Administration Building
81 Victoria Street, Singapore 188065

Tel: +65 6828 0882

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