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.

Only students in the Executive MPA program.

Policy, operations, and leadership are inextricably linked. This course aims to expose students to policy formation in a highly political environment, to operations management of systems shaped by state and local policy, and to the requirements and pressures faced by leaders wrestling with difficult problems. The course aims to build a toolbox of specific skills to assess stakeholder environments; to support analysis and decision making in a wide variety of contexts; and to appreciate the role of leadership, consensus building, and conflict management in driving policy outcomes.

This short course will explore the concept of accountability within humanitarian intervention. In particular it will look at the contemporary significance of accountability for humanitarian response – when and why it has become an important concept for humanitarian intervention, and specific events that have led to a shift from donors to recipients of aid as the agents of accountability. 

 

Key questions that will be explored include:  

Culture -- the system of shared assumptions, values, meanings, and beliefs, which informs the behavior of individuals --  is perhaps the most salient variable mechanism that influences organizational performance (Schein, 2017). Successful leadership of nonprofit organizations largely depends on how closely institutional practices align with professed public values. Strong organizational culture fosters innovation, supports collaboration, and advances impact.

Traditionally, governments have the ultimate responsibility for assuring the conditions for their people to be as healthy as they can be. In this sense one of the fundamental societal goals of health services may be considered the health improvement of the population served and for which the individual government is responsible. As our understanding of the multiple determinants of health has dramatically expanded, exercising this responsibility calls for a national health policy that goes beyond planning for the personal health care system and addresses the health of communities.

This course will focus on the issuance and management of debt by state and local governments as well as nonprofit institutions. The course will serve as an overview of how municipal and nonprofit borrowers access the capital markets, primarily through the issuance of tax-exempt bonds. Students will understand the role of the various participants in the capital markets, including but not limited to the issuer, underwriter, financial advisor, legal counsel, rating agency, insurer and investor.

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.

An understanding of government budgeting is critical to understanding the policy process and the workings of government. This course covers the theory and practice of government budgeting at both the national and subnational levels. It reviews how governments raise revenue, the process and procedures by which they allocate funds, and the various budgetary institutions that shape fiscal outcomes.

This course is designed to help students understand and make their own mark in today’s revolution in how to innovate.  Although the world still needs dedicated innovators of all kinds to create the new combinations of ideas for solving to difficult social problems, this course is based on the notion that durable social change depends on five tools for innovating in how to innovate: (1) innovative social exploring to call others to action and identify the root cause that needs to be addressed, (2) innovative social finance to leverage existing funding toward high-impac

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.

Operations management specifically involves the analysis, design, operation, and improvement of the systems and processes that deliver goods or services and ultimately outputs and outcomes. It is required to achieve the organization’s mission, provide value to the organization’s many stakeholders, and effectively translate policy into action. As such, operations management plays an important part of being an effective manager and policy implementer.