WSU Vancouver MBA Program

Superior Long-Term Performance via Stakeholder-Focused Leadership

Basic Values

WSU Vancouver's Master of Business Administration (MBA) Program is built around a stakeholder focus and its implications for competitive advantage and long term organizational performance (enlightened shareholder management).

Managing for the long term requires working in partnership with relevant stakeholders. To do this, an organization must: (1) understand the vital interdependence between businesses and critical stakeholders such as employees, investors, customers, suppliers, and public constituencies, (2) adopt an executive level perspective in making decisions and take actions that sustain strong relationships with these stakeholders, and (3) apply theory to solve practical problems.

A core concept of the program is that, "If we want accountants [and managers] who are capable of acting with integrity and understanding the broader system in which they work, we must teach them to be mindful-aware of their belief systems, conscious of consequences, and capable of thinking broadly about the impact of their actions and decisions."
(p 147 - Waddock, Sandra. 2005. "Hollow Men and Women at the Helm . . . Hollow Accounting Ethics?" Issues in Accounting Education. 20 (2), 145-150)

Theoretical Foundations

We start with the recognition that basic disciplinary theory is critical to any MBA education. The disciplinary content is adapted to recognition that organizations create competitive advantage by have capabilities that are valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, non-substitutable, durable, and lack transparency.

Next we recognize that such resources are usually intangible resources that are socially complex, have causal ambiguity, and a unique historical condition.
To create these types of capabilities requires the participation and contribution of all the organization's stakeholders. Each stakeholder directly or indirectly provides the resources needed by the organization. This requires that organizations understand the role each stakeholder plays, and provide adequate incentives to insure stakeholder participation. This theoretical foundation is diagrammed in the MBA Stakeholders Flow Chart below:

Course Specific Goals

Stakeholder, Resources and Competitive Advantage

1. Describe an organization’s strategy and the competitive advantage (or disadvantage) it holds in the marketplace.

2. Explain the interrelationship between the organization’s competencies/resources and its strategy.
   This includes:

• Identifying the key resources and success factors necessary for implementing the strategy.

• Explaining the role each type of resource plays in creating the organization’s competitive advantage.

3. Identify the role stakeholders play in providing the resources and capabilities needed by the organization.
   This includes:

• Identifying which stakeholders are critical in providing needed resources and weighing the importance of each stakeholder.

• Explaining how organizational actions affect their ability to secure needed resources from stakeholders.

• Identifying and explaining the indirect effects of the organization’s actions on the interaction between various stakeholders and the implications for their relationship with the organization.

• Recommending how the organization should approach tradeoffs among competing stakeholder demands.

4. Apply techniques for determining causality to the analysis of stakeholder effects on the resource base of an organization.

Administrative Control (Accounting)

1. Design a performance measurement system for an organization based on a causality analysis.
   This includes:

• Explaining how resource inputs lead to outcomes and provides feedback which will guide modifications to strategy.

• Applying alternative and complementary performance measurement systems such as budgeting, activities based costing, and the balanced scorecard.

• Creating one or more performance measurement systems using a local organizational context.

2. Apply performance measurement to help mitigate organizational tensions such as long-term versus short-term goals, tensions among stakeholders, and profit-growth-control tradeoffs with attention towards the design of controls that diffuse tensions.

3. Apply performance measures to evaluate the soundness of a strategy and assumed causal links (performance levels consistent with causal structure implied by the strategy – feedback loop).

4. Recognize that strategic decisions require the allocation of decision rights and resources among stakeholders and design performance measurement systems that reflect these choices using the balanced scorecard.

Information Systems Management

1. Explore organizational needs for information and how information systems meet those needs.

2. Evaluate information technology acquisitions including:

• Assessing the feasibility of alternative technology solutions.
• Determining how the technology solution affects stakeholders.
• Prioritizing system requirements and constraints.
• Determining of the organization to build or buy the technology.
• Determining resources needs for implementing the technology system.
• Constructing a decision matrix for evaluating alternative technology systems.
• Developing an implementation and post-implementation plan.
• Creating the appropriate documentation needed to defend a technology acquisition to management.

Managerial Leadership and Productivity

Determine how to secure the cooperation of stakeholders to achieve organizational goals with specific emphasis on four stakeholders: 1) peers beside you, 2) employees below you, 3) bosses above you, and 4) actors outside of your organization.

This includes applying theories and techniques of team building, group dynamics, motivation, intra-organizational power and politics, goal setting, conflict management, persuasion, and workplace fairness to:

• Work within and lead teams of colleagues.
• Motivate your subordinates.Motivate your subordinates.
• Manage your superiors and other powerful people in order to implement your strategies and protect your subordinates.
• Manage tensions between employees and other stakeholders.
• Better diagnose workplace problems, invent solutions, and get the solutions implemented.Better diagnose workplace problems, invent solutions, and get the solutions implemented.

Managing Value-Chain Partnerships

1. Determine how to manage relationships with value-chain partners such as alliance partners, vendors, and distributors. Determine how to manage relationships with value-chain partners such as alliance partners, vendors, and distributors. 

• Identifying alternative value chains including international supply chains.
• Evaluating an organization.
• Finding and selecting value-chain partners.
• Monitoring and controlling partner relationships.
• Allocating profit across the value-chain.
• Determine the antecedents to building partner trust and commitment.

2. Evaluate the effect of partner relationships on other stakeholders including:

• Customer reactions to partner organizations.
• Partner-employee relations.
• Partner effects on organizational growth and investment opportunities.
• Effects of outsourcing on other stakeholders.

3. Evaluate how cultural differences affect partner relationship management.

Marketing Management and Administrative Policy

Develop and justify an action-oriented marketing strategy and apply marketing theories and techniques to:

• Identify, evaluate, and quantify customer needs in order to determine if a market opportunity exists.
• Estimate potential benefits to the organization of pursuing a market opportunity.
• Evaluate the long-term sustainability of a market opportunity.
• Identify the key success factors, necessary resources, and alternative approaches for pursuing a market opportunity.
• Recommend a marketing strategy and next-step actions for pursuing an opportunity.
• Evaluate the indirect and direct effects of recommended actions on stakeholders.

Problems in Financial Management

Determine if an investment will increase or decrease the wealth of an organization.
This includes:

• Identifying and measuring the incremental cash flows resulting from organizational actions with special emphasis on the effects of externalities.
• Determining how much money a project should generate in order to make it a prudent investment.
• Using real data and implementing models of investment valuation.
• Explaining agency theory and its implications for the relationships between management and stakeholders.

Strategy Formulation and Organizational Design

1. Analyze an organization’s current competitive position with respect to the environment (industry key success factors) and the organization’s history, resources, and values and prepare a theoretically grounded set of strategic recommendations for enhancing competitive advantage that builds on the organization’s core competencies.


2. Develop a comprehensive plan for implementing proposed strategic recommendations that effectively aligns key strategic tasks with critical organizational components (i.e., people, the formal organization, and the informal organization).


3. Develop a comprehensive plan for managing the process of strategic change that addresses how to clarify and redesign tasks, motivate change, manage the strategic transition, and shape the political dynamics of change.


4. Evaluate the implications of a strategic decision on multiple stakeholders and recommend a strategic course of action that takes these implications into account.
   

Business Ethics and Public Stakeholders

Examine the management of stakeholder relationships from a normative perspective, to evaluate the effects of publics (including governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, communities, and the public at large) on organizational strategy, and to apply a formal process to identify and address ethical conflicts between firms and stakeholders.
This includes:

• Identifying and evaluating the importance of resources provided by publics.
• Evaluating the role of the “moral manager” in making business decisions including resolving tradeoffs among stakeholders.
• Evaluating the social contract between the firm and public stakeholders and evaluating how this social contract should guide decision making.
• Applying a formal ethical framework that incorporates both personal values and broader utilitarian, rights/duties, and justice considerations into making decisions.

Statistical Analysis for Business Decisions

Apply basic tools for forecasting market conditions that influence the organization’s strategic decisions. Both quantitative and judgment-based methods are explored. In addition, simple statistical tools that can be used to understand and manage stakeholder relationships are explored.
This includes:

• Applying basic time series and regression models to forecast sales and other variables.
• Explaining how statistical tools and concepts like Total Quality Management, Customer Relationship Management, and surveys can be used to understand and manage stakeholder relationships.
• Applying basic judgment-based new product develop tools to forecast market conditions and demand in dynamic markets.
• Explaining how simply judgment-based tools for analyzing disruptive products can be used to forecast changes in industry dynamics and the nature of competition.

Final MBA Examination

Apply an integrated model to assess the opportunities and risks associated with a strategic decision, including an assessment of how key issues affect the organization’s stakeholders. As such, the strategic decision must have multiple stakeholder implications. Students will build on analyses from prior courses to create a deliverable to an organization that includes:

• Identifying the strategic decision and assessing its impact on the resource mix of the organization.
• Identifying the stakeholders directly and indirectly impacted by the strategic decision.
• Identifying and applying the discipline-based theories and models to develop an action plan to address the strategic problem. Students must apply a minimum of three major theoretical frameworks from core business disciplines.