Through Darla Moore School's #1 ranked (as per U.S. News & World Report) undergraduate and postgraduate international business programs, Professor Messner offers a hands-on learning experienced combined with cutting-edge ideas for students who are preparing a career in international business and/or management consulting.
Information about his corporate training and executive education programs can be found here: Executive education.
This advanced international strategy course is offered in cooperation with the South Carolina Small Business Development Centers (SC SBDC). It places you in the role of a management consultant or advisor to a company which has expressed strong interest in expanding its global business footprint. You will work alongside SC SBDC business consultants to engage the client, understand the client’s business needs, conduct a market analysis, and develop concrete go-forward recommendations. You will also work with a leading global trade management software by Integration Point, and have the opportunity to earn an Integration Point global trade analyst business certification.
Beyond Outsourcing: Doing Business in India
IBUS490I
India is a land of contrasts. Nowhere else will you find such an abundance of wealth so close to traumatizing poverty, business parks with manicured lawns adjacent to polluted slums, high-end research centers and pervasive analphabetism. But India’s economy is driving demand; things keep changing and growing at a speed unknown to us. Business models which bring you success in America are unlikely to work in India. As an international manager, you will need to learn new strategies.
After about eight weeks of preparatory classroom sessions, the business study abroad trip to India is intended to immerse you into India’s contrasts, and show you how things really work in India. Our travels will takes us to the supercity of Bangalore, the Tier-2 city of Mysore, and the Kabini reservoir in the Nagarhole National Park.
The Business Case for Services Offshoring
IBUS432, IBUS790
This course points out how to formulate and present a professional judgment on a corporate initiative with a sound business case based on the elements of cost, benefit, risk, and strategic flexibility. A business case is viewed both as a document and as a process. As a document, it can help to provide a top-down justification for a rational decision. As a process, it builds robust and lasting consensus among stakeholders.
Services offshoring is an example of such a corporate initiative, and often a contentious topic. Policy makers, business executives, thought leaders, and even presidential candidates express strong and often conflicting opinions about deploying young college graduates in emerging countries to take over development and service functions that were previously performed in a company’s home location. Is it worth it?
This course has been designed to provide you with a practical framework for building business cases, and increase your skills of writing and presenting compelling reports for management approval. While we take services offshoring as an example, the concepts, frameworks, and tools covered in this course are useful all the way from market expansion scenarios, marketing campaigns, information technology investments, and also sales situations.
Managing Cross-border Teams
IBUS431, IBUS717
What does culture have to do with business? Unlike hard data from market studies and management models, culture is soft, slippery, and, at times, contradictory. Business people often interact with culturally different colleagues, competitors, suppliers, and government officials. They all operate with their own set of ‘rules’ of how they should act in a meeting, or run a negotiation, or plan a project, or decide whom to recruit. It’s often easiest to spot culture at work when things don’t go as expected.
In this course, you will learn how to collaborate more effectively in an international team, all the way from using virtual collaboration tools to dealing with cultural and time-zone differences, to being a better global team player and leader. You will also realize that culture is not the only impediment to international teams; a country’s economic climate, job market, and the team members’ individual work values are equally important.
From a theory point of view, this course is concerned with helping you understand the basis on which culturally different ‘others’ operate in international teams; it aims to provide you with tools to help you develop intercultural literacy to overcome differences. Contemporary cultural theory provides a framework for you to analyze your own cultural assumptions, behavior of culturally different ‘others’, and effectively manage cross-cultural differences encountered in the workplace.
Managing and Analyzing Data for Business Decisions
MIB Bootcamp
The increasing complexity of industry and commerce and global trends such as big data, the analytics revolution, or digitalization mean that companies must take a more sophisticated approach towards their decision-making. To select the best course of action, decisions are often based on visualization of the information contained within hard data. Wherever possible, management consultants also need to support their recommendations with quantifiable information.
However, today’s senior managers often fail to understand some of the underlying (statistical) principles and they rely too often on their guts. At the same time, junior consultants in the world’s leading strategy and management consulting companies are frequently assigned extensive analytical data-crunching tasks, but they often face challenges with rather basic statistical spreadsheet evaluations.
The course intends to build quantitative skills by combining statistical theory with applied data management and visualization techniques in Microsoft Excel and Tableau. Considering various types of research and analysis methods, the course provides lectures about key ideas, concepts, and techniques, which are immediately followed up with hands-on exercises. This blended learning initiative gives students a hands-on guideline for analyzing data.