Do you want to think about the future with more creativity and optimism? Do you want to see what’s coming faster, so you can be better prepared for disruptions and more in control of your future? Do you want to get better at changing what’s possible today – in your company, your industry, your community, and in your own life? This course will introduce you to the practice of futures thinking, as developed and applied for the past 50 years by the Institute for the Future, a Silicon-Valley-based research and learning group founded in 1968. In this course, you’ll build your understanding of what futures thinking is and what you can do with it. You’ll master essential foresight techniques. You’ll meet some professional futurists. And you’ll choose one or more future topics you want to investigate with your new foresight skills. This course is for anyone who wants to spot opportunities for innovation and invention faster. You can gain the skills and confidence to help YOU become someone who makes the future, instead of letting the future happen to you. Many thanks to the Enlight Foundation and the Enlight Collaborative, which provided a grant to support the creation of this course.

Finding and hiring the right people is often cited as the number one concern of businesses today. It seems we are all competing for the best and brightest workers. As you will see in our time together in the second course, a critical component of the People Manager Value Proposition is to hire talented people who enable the organization to achieve its strategic goals. This course is an introduction into the topic of recruitment, selection and onboarding. At the outset of the course we will explore the importance of linking recruitment goals with overall company strategy. We then look at a number of options to recruit and select employees both effectively and legally. Throughout the course we will examine current issues in talent acquisition, such as how companies are now leveraging social media and hiring analytics to ensure better quality hires. At the conclusion of the course, we look at how to onboard employees to promote employee commitment and engagement.

Although traditional marketing strategies are still used, companies continue to shift their focus to digital approaches such as search engines, social media. These technologies take into account the journey of the customer and how they make their purchase decisions. It is important for marketers to have an understanding of digital marketing strategies and familiarize themselves with the key technologies underlying them. This course will offer students a panoramic view of digital marketing and provide insights into key strategies using Internet-based platforms. In addition, it will focus on content that resonates with consumers that helps businesses differentiate themselves in competitive markets.

Do you want to learn how to simulate the future more creatively and more effectively? This course is for you. Humans are the only living creatures with the ability to think about and make plans for the long- term future. Even so, our brains don’t always make it easy. Over the past decade, scientists have discovered a number of neurological “road blocks” to effective futures thinking. These glitches in the brain make it harder for us to accurately predict how we’ll feel and what we’re likely to do, when a particular future arrives. They lead us to make faulty assumptions about which futures are likely or unlikely to happen. And they convince us we have less power to shape and influence the future than we actually do – leaving us stuck in the present. In this course, you’ll learn how to overcome these obstacles so you can think about the future more strategically and creatively. You’ll practice simulation techniques for “unsticking” the mind when it comes to seeing what’s possible in the future and accepting how things could be different. You’ll also learn how to lead others through “first-person future” simulations, which have been shown in scientific studies to improve strategy and increase motivation and hope for the future. Along the way, leading futurists from the Institute from the Future will share some of their most challenging forecasts to help you stretch your imagination and improve your simulation skills. This course will ensure that you can put all of your new forecasting skills to the best possible use, by helping you nudge your brain toward more effective ways of simulating and preparing for the future. Many thanks to the Enlight Foundation and the Enlight Collaborative, which provided a grant to support the creation of this course.

Through this ESG Investing: Industry Impacts & Transformations course, students with basic knowledge of traditional financial products can explore how certain financial market sectors have been transforming, amid a heightened focus on risk factors that underpin the three pillars of ESG. For example, what led age-old, iconic companies such as Borden and Dean Foods to file for bankruptcy? How are traditional oil giants BP and Exxon Mobil managing the energy transition? And what steps are firms such as International Paper and WestRock taking to align their business operations with forestry concerns? Through a series of video, webinar, and reading modules, among other objectives, you’ll learn how to conduct critical analyses about certain market sector changes, including dairy, tobacco, energy, and forest products, as well as examine the potential role for certain commodities, as industries such as the auto sector undergo transformation. You should also be able to assess the potential impacts on the creditworthiness of certain high yield companies amid shifts in ESG strategies.

The capstone for the Global Challenges in Business specialization will provide a learning experience that integrates across all the courses within that specialization. It will involve analysis of a situation concerning an actual business with a view to work toward a global stakeholder engagement business plan for introduction of a new product. Students will analyze a situation taking the vantage point of a global company and develop a global stakeholder engagement plan for a specific geography (chosen by students’ region or country of residence, or other consideration).

This course is part of a Specialization titled “Strategy and Finance for a Lifecycle of a Social Business”. It is an introduction to time value of money and will help the learner understand the basics of finance with the ultimate goal of valuing a company from a societal lens. The beauty of the modern decision-making framework is that it can be used to understand value creation at any level – the individual, the corporate or nonprofit entity level and from the point of view of society. The applications however become increasingly complex as your lens expands from the individual to the corporate/nonprofit to the global society. In this Specialization we will therefore focus on understanding the frameworks and tools that an individual and an entity (a startup or an established corporation, private or public) can use to understand value enhancing decision-making. There are two building blocks of decision making – time value of money and risk. In this second course, we will use the same framework developed in the first course to evaluate decision-making by entities – businesses – to create value. We will realize how the evaluating value from the lens of multiple stakeholders is inherently more complex. You are also encouraged to think from a societal standpoint because that, ultimately, is the difference between a social and a private business. The societal perspective is the most complex and market prices are typically not available for both the benefits and costs. As indicated at the outset, the beauty of modern frameworks and tools of analysis is that they are logical and do not change depending on the purpose of business. However, to demonstrate social impact is very complex because prices for both the public good, and any harm created by our actions, are not available. It is also very challenging to determine the incremental effect of a business on society at large. The combination of these issues makes all social impact and value specific to a business, making it even more important to use the same frameworks and tools developed in this Specialization to value any business.

By the end of this project, you will be able to create a simple Gantt chart to manage your next project. You will utilize the free online version of Microsoft Excel to create a Gantt chart from scratch. This Gantt chart will give you a better idea of how bar charts and conditional formatting work. This guide will incorporate some Excel functions to teach you how to use conditional formatting to make your chart and data interactive. In addition, this Gantt chart will allow you to track multiple tasks that run parallel with each other, and will incorporate some unique features such as a weekly view bar to organize dates more efficiently.

Problem-solving and effective decision-making are essential skills in today’s fast-paced and ever-changing workplace. Both require a systematic yet creative approach to address today’s business concerns. This course will teach an overarching process of how to identify problems to generate potential solutions and how to apply decision-making styles in order to implement and assess those solutions. Through this process, you will gain confidence in assessing problems accurately, selecting the appropriate decision-making approaches for the situation at hand, making team decisions, and measuring the success of the solution’s implementation. Using case studies and situations encountered by class members, you will explore proven, successful problem-solving and decision-making models and methods that can be readily transferred to workplace projects. Upon completing this course, you will be able to: 1. Identify key terms, styles, and approaches to effective problem-solving and decision-making 2. Explain both the affordances and limitations associated with problem-solving and decision-making 3. Reflect on how mindset and personal bias influence your ability to solve problems and make decisions 4. Explain and discuss how organizational decisions or non-decisions impact personal development, team dynamics, and company-wide performance 5. Articulate how both good and bad team decisions can benefit your professional growth

The capstone project involves an in-depth analysis of an actual business situation in which you will examine the global economic environment of a business. The final project will be a business plan that uses statistical tools and economic theory to create a comprehensive analysis of the microeconomic and macroeconomic environment in which the focal company operates. This course is part of the iMBA offered by the University of Illinois, a flexible, fully-accredited online MBA at an incredibly competitive price. For more information, please see the Resource page in this course and onlinemba.illinois.edu.