Business Administration

This course examines the foundations and evolution of management and organizational theory, focusing on strategic decision-making in complex and globalized environments. It explores the interplay between organizational structure, strategy, ethics, and human behavior, while developing analytical skills for competitive and responsible management.

This course covers the basic concepts and theories in technology and innovation management to enable the organization’s strategic destinations, covering stages from fuzzy front end to strategy execution. This course provides students with different schools of thought, approaches, and techniques on innovative idea generation through group discussions and workshops such as Design Thinking (Stanford d.school), Human Centered Innovation Workshop.

This course provides a comprehensive understanding of business ethics in modern work organizations. Students explore key concepts and theories, focusing on ethical and unethical behaviors within organizations. Students gain awareness of how organizations strive to manage their workforce and environments responsibly and sustainably. The course covers non-mainstream elements of organizational life, including organizational misbehavior and corporate crime. Students develop skills to analyze and solve organizational ethical problems using business ethics knowledge. Additionally, they understand the increasing importance of ethics, corporate responsibility, and sustainability for organizations today. 

The course develops students’ problem-solving skills, creativity, and commercial awareness. Acting as consultants, students identify and evaluate business opportunities using tools like SWOT, PEST, and Ansoff’s Matrix. This course bridges the gap between academic knowledge and real-world applications, making students’ expertise more relevant in business contexts. The course culminates in a consultancy project where students analyze a business and recommend innovative changes to that company’s business model. Students develop a consultancy mindset (i.e. commercializing focused both aware of other stakeholder interests and expectations), gain essential analytical skills, and further develop their abilities to innovate creating value in various contexts. 

This course is designed to develop professional English skills for students in economics, management, and information systems. It focuses on the language and communication strategies required in international business environments, with an emphasis on practical application in economic analysis, project management, and IT-related contexts.

This course provides students with in-depth learning on managing multinational corporations across various product, business, and geographic markets. Specifically, the course focuses on three central issues that are critical to the successful formulation of corporate strategy: (1) the decisions on which businesses bring resources together inside the company and how they could create value, (2) how the company can grow in different settings through acquisitions, partnerships, or internal development, and (3) how the company manages its business portfolio. Overall, this course highlights the criticality of making decisions about the right pathways to firm growth. It provides theoretical frameworks and guiding principles for analyzing practical problems at the corporate or group level as experienced by managers.

This multidisciplinary course relates basic economic thinking to the real economy, covering the historical developments of economic institutions in the US and Japan as well as global strategies of Japanese corporations such as DeNA, Mercari, Suntory, Uniqlo, Seven Eleven and JR East, etc. The course also introduces related topics of FinTech and economic analysis of Law.. 

The course links share prices or returns to accounting items from the income statement and the balance sheet and in doing so effectively advises standard setters and regulators regarding the value-relevance of accounting information, especially bottom-line earnings and book value of equity. It also advises about the value-relevance of management (performance related) narratives, which often complement the disclosure of the audited income statement and balance sheet. Unlike classical financial statement analysis this course does not attempt to value individual companies. Instead, it analyses large sample evidence generated from regression analysis. It is important to note from the very beginning that this course is based to a large extent on journal articles. The main journals of interest in this course are Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting & Economics, Review of Accounting Studies, European Accounting Review (EAR), and Accounting & Business Research (ABR). This course is unusual in the sense that it is based on journal articles not a textbook.

This course provides a systematic introduction of concepts, theories and practices, with a focus on handling conflict and negotiation. The course content is composed of two intimately related parts. The beginning introduces the nature and types of conflict, mechanism of conflict escalation and de-escalation, and conflict resolution styles. The rest of the class sessions discuss the characteristics of interest-based negotiation and negotiation strategies. Specifically, the course teaches strategies to avoid various cognitive biases in conflict situations and negotiation, the building blocks of negotiation, the difference of distributive versus value-creating negotiation approaches, the strategies of achieving integrative outcomes, building trust and controlling emotions, utilizing power and persuasion, the importance of non-verbal communication in gaining information and ethics. Some topics are also covered in the context of cross-cultural negotiation and computer-mediated negotiation to cater to the need of today’s international business environment. 

This course gives students an understanding of the key topics and contemporary debates in work and employment relations. Students engage with key concepts and theoretical frameworks in the sociology of work and employment relations. They explore what work means to individuals and the various forms it can take. The course recognizes how employees interact with employers and the conflicts that can arise from these interactions. Students examine relevant trends and developments in the world of work, such as gig work, remote working and the impact of technology on work, as well as the "future of work." This prepares students for the practical challenges of managing complex employment relationships in the workplace.