Disruptive technologies are fueling digital transformation at unprecedented levels, demanding us to rethink our roles and tasks, adopt new responsibilities, and manage the range of emotions that result from all the above. Navigating the transitions sparked by digitally-driven change requires deep awareness—of ourselves and others. This new program leverages leadership assessments and group coaching to provide leaders with insights, tools, and frameworks for navigating the human side of these transitions.

Please note: The application deadline for this course is 7 days prior to course start.

Digitally driven change is upending the way we live and work and posing an increasing number of challenges for business leaders, who must manage a waterfall of decisions around hiring, training, resource allocation, and investments in technologies while continuing to lead their companies to success. Entire teams may be asked to transform their skills and ways of working as a result. How can we help ourselves and others to respond nimbly to change and be better prepared for the next disruption? And what is required to shift successfully from fragility to agility and thrive in this new world of work?

Led by Hal Gregersen and Roger Lehman and conducted live online, this innovative new program emphasizes the creative intelligence and soft skills required of leaders when change happens. The course provides a transition toolkit to draw on as well as a structured process for containing, metabolizing, and addressing disruptive transitions, tackling the question, how do we recognize and successfully navigate transitions when change happens?

Course faculty also include Vivienne Ming, founder and executive chair at Socos Labs, and Rana el Kaliouby, co-founder and CEO of Affectiva, who will explore in depth the human side of digital transitions.

Participants will be asked to complete leadership assessments (for use in a group coaching day) and submit a summary of the key transition challenges they are facing as a result of digital disruption and transformation prior to the start of the program.

Learn more about the live online experience. 

The landscape for leadership has changed. Increasingly, leaders are accountable for the economic and social welfare of the entire enterprise while simultaneously running a business, project, function, or geography. We refer to this role as an enterprise leader. If you are such a leader and/or if you oversee a team of such leaders, this executive training course is intended to help you sharpen mindsets, and skillsets required to shepherd your entire organization toward greater agility and growth. It is also designed to help you create a culture in which leaders are held accountable for having an enterprise perspective.

For the past couple of decades, companies have focused on creating strong leaders of business units and influential heads of functions who are responsible for achieving results in one corner of an organization. But many of these same companies have underemphasized a more important challenge: developing leaders who see the enterprise as a whole and act for its greater good. That perspective has become increasingly necessary as companies seek to provide not just products, but the broad-based, integrated solutions customers now demand.

Led by and based on the research of MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Douglas Ready, an expert on organizational transformation and the role of senior executive teams in driving change, Leading Enterprise Teams is designed to help senior executives think differently about what constitutes effective leadership in this ever-evolving environment. If you serve on or oversee an enterprise-level team, or if you are responsible for hiring and developing such teams, this executive training course is for you.

Through lectures, case studies, and highly interactive discussions, you will be presented with the key mindsets and skill sets necessary to lead with an enterprise perspective. Course content will address many of the leadership challenges you face including:

• How to lead collectively at an enterprise level while also leading your own teams at a functional level
• Straddling functional and geographic responsibilities in the context of a team that includes other executives with similar paradoxes
• Identifying when suboptimal systems are actually beneficial to the enterprise
• Understanding when functional orientation a benefit to the organization and when does it becomes a cost

The program will also feature an Executive Perspective to embed the enterprise leadership concepts in a real-life context. 

Greg Hill is President and Chief Operating Officer of Hess Corporation, a global independent energy company engaged in the exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas. He will share his personal journey from unit to enterprise leader, and an executive’s perspective on the importance of creating an organization where the culture, values and goals of various units are aligned to work towards the greater good of the enterprise.

Learn more about the live online experience. 

The gap between the skillsets needed yesterday and those needed tomorrow is being widened by the ways in which algorithms, data, and transformative technologies are reshaping work and how we do it. In this new online program, you’ll learn how to harness the momentum and key principles of algorithms and transformative technologies to help bridge some of these gaps in your organization and to more successfully manage and lead your teams in the digital economy.

When we think about building the organizations, institutions, and society of the future, we invariably look to technology to lend a hand. Indeed, our visions of tomorrow are shaped by innovations delivered by algorithms currently powering many aspects of our life and work. To successfully lead organizations in the digital economy, we must upgrade the way we think about, communicate around, and act upon technology in our companies. Today’s organizations need more translators who can convert computer science to business value and who can help their teams share a common language across all business functions, both technical and non-technical.

Algorithmic Business Thinking is designed to help you understand and apply key concepts that lie at the heart of transformative technologies to your corporate and people strategies. Over the course of the six weeks, faculty will pull back the “curtain” to show you how algorithms and the technologies on which they are based are built, how they work, and how you can use them across your business. While this program will introduce some basic coding principles, this program is less about how to code and more about illuminating the building blocks of algorithms, so that you can re-use those same building blocks to create new business value.

You will walk away from this program with a practical playbook to help you and your teams apply Algorithmic Business Thinking in your organization wherever and whenever it’s useful.
 

This course aims to prepare you, and your organization, for an evolving workplace as it investigates its impact on social, legal, and economic policy. Over six weeks, you’ll explore the reasons why workplace advancements require a new, updated social contract — the mutual expectations and obligations workers, employers, and society have for work relationships — so that the quality of jobs can be improved, inequalities can be addressed, and everyone can prosper.

This program is delivered in collaboration with GetSmarter. Please register on the GetSmarter website.

The world of work has changed significantly, as have the needs of the modern workforce. Today, employees and business leaders face unprecedented challenges in the workplace, with a labor market that’s affected by trends such as globalization, automation, artificial intelligence, growing wealth inequality, and climate change. The rate of this transformation has also outpaced many of the public policies, business strategies, and organizational practices that were previously designed to govern work, pay, and employment relations.

Leading the Future of Work aims to prepare you, and your organization, for an evolving workplace as it investigates its impact on social, legal, and economic policy. Over six weeks, you’ll explore the reasons why workplace advancements require a new, updated social contract — the mutual expectations and obligations workers, employers, and society have for work relationships — so that the quality of jobs can be improved, inequalities can be addressed, and everyone can prosper. You’ll also develop the tools and strategies to create this new social contract, examine the role of technology and automation in work, and learn how to empower both your employees and shareholders alike.

Program Experience

This executive program integrates rich interactive media—such as videos, infographics, and e-learning activities—as well as traditional didactic components such as written study guides (course notes). There are opportunities for collaborative learning through discussion forums.

The program begins with an Orientation to welcome you to the Online Campus. During Orientation, you will explore your analysis environment, become comfortable with your new online classroom, meet your Success Team, and get to know your fellow classmates. Watch the video about the online campus experience.

After Orientation, the course is broken down into six manageable, weekly modules, designed to accelerate your learning process through diverse learning activities:

• Work through your downloadable and online instructional material
• Interact with your peers and learning facilitators through weekly class-wide forums and small group discussions
• Enjoy a wide range of interactive content, including video lectures, infographics, live polls, and more
• Investigate rich, real-world case studies
• Apply what you learn each week to quizzes and ongoing project submissions

Each module is released weekly, allowing a flexible but structured approach to learning. You’ll be supported as you engage in individual activities and group discussions, ensuring you feel confident to submit your best work at each weekly deadline. The time commitment is estimated at 6-8 hours per week, self-paced and entirely online.

Success Team

Throughout the course of the program, you will be supported by a team of professionals.

• Head Facilitator: A subject expert who’ll guide you through content-related challenges
• Success Manager: Your one-on-one support available during MIT hours (9am - 5pm EST) to resolve technical and administrative challenges
• Global Success Team: Available 24/7 to solve your tech-related and administrative queries and concerns

Learn more about the GetSmarter course experience. 
Learn more about GetSmarter technical requirements.  

Communicating and persuading effectively with data is a crucial skill for anyone who wants to lead in a modern organization. If presenting and explaining data to a non-technical audience is part of your job, this data storytelling course is for you. Highly practical and collaborative, this course combines visualization and strategic communication best practices to help you communicate data more effectively and influence others to take action based on data through data storytelling. 

This interactive course will give you the opportunity to improve your communication skills through practice and detailed feedback from the instructor and your classmates. You will have the opportunity to use that feedback to improve a current slide or presentation you are working on. 

By the end of this class, you will emerge with impactful materials, useful frameworks, and an improved ability to persuade others with data through data storytelling.

No matter how good machines and algorithms get, leaders will still need the ability to influence and persuade others to make the best possible decisions based on the technology and data at hand. Whether your job requires you to communicate with leaders, colleagues, clients, or customers, you need to simplify and clarify your findings for your audience in order to persuade with data.

This course is taught by Miro Kazakoff, a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan, entrepreneur, and consultant focused on how individuals use data to persuade others. As a participant in this interactive course, you will learn professional and practical skills required to develop, design, and deliver high-quality, logical communications grounded in quantitative data. You will learn how to craft clear and powerful narratives to guide audiences through your data and understand why the insights are important. You will also explore ways in which visual tools such as graphs, charts, and diagrams can be used in data storytelling to highlight your insights in a way that spreadsheets and dashboards cannot. You will leave this course a better data storyteller than you came.

This is not a course about analytics tools; it is focused on communication skills. You will need access to a form of slide presentation software (e.g., PowerPoint, KeyNote, or Google) and a tool for visualizing data (Excel, Tableau, etc.). Come with a graph you can edit and improve.

This self-paced online course is the definitive guide to harnessing social media effectively and ethically to achieve your organizational goals.

This program is delivered in collaboration with GetSmarter. Please register on the GetSmarter website.

By enabling us to both consume and share content with a simple tap of a screen, social media has empowered people, and organizations, to shape public opinion and drive action like never before. This has given companies the opportunity to enhance their consumer loyalty and engagement, but has also raised questions around the influence social media may have on our behavior.

The program draws on evidence-based, cross-disciplinary research from Sinan Aral’s latest book, The Hype Machine, which investigates the ways in which social media affects our decision making and shapes the world we live in. Guided by industry experts, this program moves from theory into strategic application, providing you with the tools and frameworks to navigate the perils of social media and leverage its promise within your organization. In addition, the course will teach you to enhance your digital marketing strategy using powerful techniques and a deep understanding of the science behind social media.

Learn more about the GetSmarter course experience. 

Learn more about the GetSmarter technical requirements. 

Drawing on the importance of neuroscience principles like neuroplasticity, this program looks at promoting organizational and personal resilience, leadership development, and business performance.

The modern business environment is constantly evolving. As a result of this rapid change, there’s an increase in the amount of information that needs to be processed and problems that need to be solved. Now, more than ever, there is a demand for resilient and agile leaders who can effectively adapt to change and drive innovation.

Although business leaders do not have control over the external factors impacting their businesses, they can prepare themselves and their organizations to better respond to, and navigate through, change. The Neuroscience for Business online short course takes a scientific approach to leadership. Drawing on the importance of neuroscience principles like neuroplasticity, it looks at promoting organizational and personal resilience, leadership development, and business performance.

Gain an in-depth understanding of the brain and the tools you need to rewire it to maximize your leadership potential. Over six weeks, you’ll learn how to change and refine the way you think, in order to enhance how you engage with and motivate others, and boost personal and organizational performance. With key insights from industry experts, you’ll gain a better understanding of the areas for improvement in your business, and create a strategy that maps out your vision for your organization, as well as the steps required to achieve it.

Learn more about the GetSmarter course experience.
Learn more about GetSmarter technical requirements.
 

Organizations must innovate and adapt quickly to survive and thrive in an exponentially changing world. This means addressing both external and internal forces—innovating at speed to meet rapidly evolving customer demands as well as addressing the changing requirements and expectations of employees. This course will help you architect and lead a nimble organization that frees people to innovate while maintaining strategic alignment and accountability, meeting the needs of both customers and employees.

Command-and-control bureaucracies are too rigid and slow to keep pace with rapid change; today’s leaders must be capable of removing organizational and cultural barriers to change. But until now, an alternative model has not emerged. Leaders know that agility requires pushing power, decision making, and resource allocation lower in the organization—but how do they do it without losing control and falling into chaos?

Nimble Leadership is designed to help you architect and lead a nimble organization by freeing people to innovate and maintaining strategic alignment and accountability, without imposing bureaucracy. Nimble is a system of leadership in which an organization’s purpose, strategy, structure, culture, and leadership practices enable leaders up and down the organization to dream up new ideas and bring them to life. The goal is to build and run a team-based, networked organization that is customer-centric and can quickly sense and seize new opportunities that will win in the marketplace.

Through a combination of theory, cases, exercises, and self-reflection, you will learn how to diagnose the risks and barriers to change in your organization and understand how your own leadership style needs to evolve to match the needs of a nimble organization.

New competitors, digitization of product and service offerings and delivery, and unforeseeable events are shaking up our businesses, economies, and global society. While innovation around products and services are necessary to stay ahead, innovating around your business model is essential for delivering longer lasting competitive advantage. This new online business course demonstrates how exploring your business model logic and its implications for organizational structure can improve your organization’s approach to innovation and customer value creation.

Taught by innovation pioneer and MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Bill Fischer, Business Model Innovation takes a deep dive into how organizations can enhance their competitive advantage and benefits to the customer. As a participant, you’ll learn how to look under the hood of your organization to better understand the business models, corporate culture, and coordinating mechanisms that power it—in other words, its “operating system,” and then explore ways to competitive differentiation by innovating with your organization's value proposition reimagining the logic of the underlying operating model.

Featuring case studies and exercises to prototype your own business and organizational models, this new course will equip you with the tools and frameworks to analyze:

• Where your business creates value for customers now; where customers are looking for new value creation in a competitive, multi-actor ecosystem; and how and where to create value to meet those needs.
• Internal structure and cultural assumptions: Successful business models are supported by organizational cultures that make it easier, rather than harder, to achieve business objectives. Culture is the outcome of managerial choices, and we will explore what those choices are and how they can be made to work more effectively.

Upon completing this online business course, you will be able to build a coherent and compelling business model narrative to describe and guide your operational managerial choices. You will also understand what is required to ensure a scalable learning culture that both inspires workers to take chances and provides the structural elements to make it possible for them to do so.

Digital media and methods are transforming businesses around the world. However, a recent global study of thousands of organizations and C-suite leaders show a startling gap in readiness to compete, let alone win, in this new environment. This new course is designed to help participants define and achieve great leadership for their organizations in the new digital economy.

We are all very familiar with the megatrends, such as digitalization and the changing nature of work, that are making this world a more complex place. Indeed, leaders of digital enterprises have a unique opportunity to not only transform their businesses, but to help transform their customers as well. What will define great leadership in the new digital economy? What new leadership behaviors are needed, and how can organizations make the behaviors the norm throughout an organization?

The faculty of this timely new course draw from a global study of thousands of companies and C-suite leaders to shed light on capability gaps and provide research-based insights to help executives create the conditions for digital enterprise success.

Through self-assessments, lectures, breakout sessions, and examples of leading companies like Amazon, Google, Alibaba, Netflix, Booking.com, this course will help you shape and articulate a powerful narrative about what great leadership looks like in your organization as well as how to engage your teams in this dialogue. You will also explore how to bake this narrative into your talent management systems and processes. Course content will include in-depth discussions on business model transformation, performance and people analytics, essentials of platform leadership and network effects, role modeling digital behaviors, and the leader’s role in culture change.

Leave this course with a playbook that opens the gates for a whole new and diverse generation of leaders in your organization.

Learn more about the live online experience. 

Guest Speakers:
 

Dan Shapero is the Chief Operating Officer at LinkedIn. He is responsible for helping companies around the world grow their business and build winning teams through the value LinkedIn delivers. In this role, he oversees global sales, operations, as well as member and customer success. Since joining LinkedIn in 2008, Dan has held various leadership roles managing global teams across sales and product management, most recently as Chief Business Officer. Prior to LinkedIn, Dan was a management consultant at Bain & Company and a startup entrepreneur. Dan holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a BS in Applied Mathematics from Johns Hopkins.

Carol Cohen is Senior Vice President and Global Head, Talent & Transformation at Cognizant. In this role, Carol focuses on hiring, developing, engaging, and retaining talent to build high-performing, diverse and inclusive teams while strengthening leadership capabilities informed by data and enabled by systems. At Cognizant, she leads talent management, leadership development, diversity & inclusion, executive recruiting, people analytics, HR systems, and overall HR transformation. Her team’s mission is to supercharge Cognizant’s talent by driving a high performing and inclusive culture. Carol is a Board member for the National Center for Women in Technology (NCWIT) and was also a founding member of the Board of Directors for the Cognizant U.S. Foundation, a $100 million non-profit dedicated to enhancing STEM education and career pathing to address the U.S. shortage of digital talent.

Carol has more than two decades of experience in strategizing and implementing HR and global talent initiatives that drive positive business outcomes and dramatically improve employee performance.  Prior to joining Cognizant, Carol was Vice President, Talent and Engagement for Thomson Reuters and Vice President, Global Talent at American Express, leading large-scale global talent management, succession planning, data and analytics, leadership development, and strategic planning and measurement initiatives. Before moving into Human Resources, Carol spent several years working as a management consultant for Perform Consulting. In that role, she led organizational effectiveness, transformation, and business process improvement efforts across technologies, retail, energy, and financial services.

Carol earned her MBA, with a concentration in International Business, from the University of Colorado and her undergraduate degree at Rutgers in Psychology and Sociology. Earlier this year, Carol Co-authored The New Leadership Playbook for the Digital Age: Reimagining What It Takes to Lead with MIT Sloan Management Review. In 2020, Carol received the MAKERS “Groundbreaker” award and Rutgers “Douglass Project Award for the Advancement of Women in STEM”.

Meera Krishnamurthy is Cognizant’s Global Head – Insurance Business Unit. She is focused on  setting the Insurance unit’s business goals, investment priorities, strategy and client relationships. She joined Cognizant in 2005 and has held several key roles in Cognizant’s Insurance practice around the world. Meera has over 26 years of experience in the financial services and insurance industries.   

Meera is a founding member of the board of directors of the Cognizant U.S. Foundation and is actively involved in a variety of Cognizant outreach and diversity programs. She is the regional leader of Cognizant’s Women Empowered business resource group in Connecticut and board member at MAKERS, a media brand built to accelerate the women’s movement through stories of real-life experiences that ignite passion and action. She regularly champions the cause of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) initiatives in the greater Hartford area, where she speaks and participates in several outreach events. 

Meera earned her bachelor's degree from the University of Madras with a specialization in computer science and mathematics.
 

Transitions are inevitable, in work and in life. Navigating them well is every leader’s responsibility. Building on the Transition-Curve Framework (research and practice on adjustment, learning, emotional response curves, and more), this unique program will help you better manage uncertainty and successfully lead others through the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional arcs that accompany disruptive change.

Change has been, and always will, be constant. The role of a leader is to identify the uncertainty that surrounds change and create the context for talking about and managing it. Disruptive change—events that challenge our lives, organizations, industries, and societies in fundamental ways—raises the stakes on all the above. How we navigate the transitions that result from disruption has a direct impact on outcomes.

Led by Hal Gregersen and Roger Lehman, this innovative new program, conducted live online, takes a deep dive into the social and psychological journey that accompanies transition. You will explore and apply key concepts and tools to guide yourself and others successfully through the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional arcs of individual and team transitions—the Transition-Curve Framework. By understanding how people move through these three arcs at their own pace, you will be better equipped to build organizational support for yourself and high-performing teams before, during, and after transitions. And you will be able to avoid common leadership mistakes that over-emphasize performance and de-emphasize the human side of transitions.

This course will include customized graphic illustrations to serve as a dynamic tool for reflection and application. Pre-reading materials will also be provided.

Learn more about the live online experience.  

Our organizations – designed for optimal performance — work well under normal conditions, but are vulnerable to failure when the unexpected occurs. How do we design systems that work efficiently under typical conditions, yet respond resiliently to “unknown unknowns”?  This new course provides business leaders with a practical approach to assess and build organizational resiliency. Learn how systems thinking and continuous improvement can help your team identify problems before they occur and fundamentally alter your organization’s ability to effectively respond when they do. Understand the role hidden factories and irregular operations play in contributing to catastrophic events, and how this knowledge can be leveraged to reverse their effects. Leave with a playbook for improving the resilience of your company.

Deepwater Horizon. The Flint water crisis. Boeing’s 737 Max. Notre Dame Cathedral. Cybersecurity breaches at Target, and most recently, SolarWinds. What do these incidents have in common? As these scenarios evolved, the systems response consistently lagged behind the incident, despite multiple opportunities for intervention.

MIT’s perspective on mitigating organizational risk and managing uncertainty is rooted in real-world practice, systems thinking, and a focus on the human factors that drive suboptimal events and processes. This new course will help you think differently—and systematically— about real-time risk/reward Improvement. Through faculty presentations, panel discussions case studies, interactive exercises, and small-group discussions, you will explore the importance of systems thinking, learn to identify and act on the warning signs of irregular operations, and understand the important roles that continuous improvement and organizational agility play in developing a more resilient organization.

You will leave this course ready to implement a 90-day playbook for improving the resiliency of your organization.

Learn more about the live online experience.