Emergency events are disruptive. Whether acutely impactful and short-term, negligible and protracted, or any mix thereof, these incidents alter healthcare organizations’ abilities to consistently deliver safe and effective care. While potentially devastating, emergencies are also unique opportunities for exemplary leadership and unprecedented innovation. COVID-19, ransomware, and active shooters are, respectively, a few of the myriad natural, technological, and intentional emergency events that healthcare organizations, and their leaders, face.

Management consultants work in all corners of the public and nonprofit sectors on every imaginable topic—from organizational strategy to technology implementation, education to migration. But what is management consulting? Why do so many public service organizations rely on it? What skills and experience do you need to be a management consultant?  And how much good can management consulting really do for the public and nonprofit sectors?

This course examines how government agencies implement plans, policies, and projects under real-world constraints. Government agencies are some of the largest and most consequential organizations shaping contemporary life, especially for the poor. Their importance is even more evident now, as governments around the world continue to mishandle the pandemic, slide towards authoritarianism, and abuse the rights of vulnerable people. Surprisingly, their outsized influence is rarely matched by an adequate amount of attention.

This class explores the important evaluation area of policy advocacy evaluation. As development practice shifts to focus on the structural drivers of poverty around the world, and seek long-term social and institutional change, interventions increasingly involve shaping policies, programs and social norms. This class examines the theoretical and practical challenges of measuring influence on policy deliberation and implementation. It explores emerging approaches developed to provide rigor and actionable insights about what works and what doesn’t.

Management consultants work in all corners of the public and nonprofit sectors on every imaginable topic—from organizational strategy to technology implementation, education to migration. But what is management consulting? Why do so many public service organizations rely on it? What skills and experience do you need to be a management consultant?  And how much good can management consulting really do for the public and nonprofit sectors?

This course brings together a wide range of thinking and scholarship about race and identity to encourage learning about what race is, why it matters, and racial dynamics in organizations and how best to address them.

Standard economic theory assumes that individuals are fully rational decision-makers; however, that is often not the case in the real world. Behavioral economics uses findings from lab and field experiments to advance existing economic models by identifying ways in which individuals are systematically irrational. This course gives an overview of key insights from behavioral science and identifies ways in which these findings have been used to advance policies on education, health, energy, taxation, and more.

Affordable housing that's 40% less expensive to build. Three times as many soup kitchen clients served each hour. Hospital ER wait time cut by 90%. This is the type of impact social innovators aspire to achieve by applying the method called "Lean."

Multi-sector partnerships represent a social innovation whereby actors from different sectors intentionally “address social issues and causes that actively engage the partners on an ongoing basis” (Selsky & Parker, 2010:22). They emerge from the recognition that solving today's complex public problems requires engaging multiple stakeholders. While promising, these innovations are not panacea: collaborative work is difficult because of structural and institutional barriers, as well as distinct assumptions, work styles, and disciplinary backgrounds of actors engaged.

An organization’s brand can help it raise money, create change, and recruit participants as it effectively communicates its mission. But a brand is more than just a logo or a memorized elevator pitch, it is the way both internal and external audiences perceive your organization—and shaping this perception is as essential to the success of nonprofit and public organizations as it is to for-profit organizations.

Developing and executing an organization’s marketing strategy can be a complicated process, but is integral to raising money, increasing visibility, recruiting brand ambassadors/influencers/advocates/supporters – and building momentum to achieve its mission. It is also affected by issues of the day and time, whether the COVID virus, racial and social injustice, the political climate and world events. 

This is a course in Contracts for the non-lawyer.  Every day we see contracts and may have to read them, sign them and/or perform them.  Many organizations are not large enough to have their own in-house counsel and calling outside counsel is expensive.  Thus, more and more executives and their staff have the responsibility of understanding the day to day contracts with which they come in contact.