General Management ***

*** Only available as a major if a student exits after three years.

This major covers the whole gamut of management areas, where students are also exposed to a wide range of core courses through which they achieve a holistic learning of Business administration. The specialisation specific courses focus on refining the student's critical abilities by providing training in synthesis, critical analysis and exposure to the basic courses in business management. The courses are geared towards study of economics, accounting principles, and improving skills in the areas of quantitative analysis, business communication and Organizational Behavior. The course in marketing management aims to start developing the basic competencies in corporate marketing.

The core courses train students in various functional areas of Business management covering financial management, operations management, human resource management supplemented by a study of business laws and business research methods. By taking advanced elective courses (300 level and above) across different functional areas such as Marketing, Operations, Entrepreneurship, Finance and Human Resource Management, students can obtain a broad but deeper understanding across these areas. For instance, students who are interested in being effective managers with interest in marketing may take 3 advanced courses in marketing and 2 courses in Human Resource Management. Capstone courses in business management like corporate governance, ethics, and business strategy are also offered to develop a holistic and an integrated view of business, its ethical aspects and its effective governance. As this major borrows from multiple areas, it is inter-disciplinary in its nature and scope, and provides ample flexibility to fulfill multiple interests of students.

SPECIALIZATION AIMS

The General Management Specialisation intends to:

• Provide a thorough learning in multiple areas of knowledge through the core courses in the area of business management, history and management Information system
• Enable the students to develop skill sets primarily communication and other soft skills relevant to the area of business management.
• Develop the ability to work in teams and achieve common professional objectives.
• Develop the understanding of planning, implementation and control of marketing operations in different type of business organizations.
• Enable the students to pursue multiple interests traversing multiple functional areas.
• Equip the students with deeper and wider knowledge across multiple areas to enable them to be more effective managers.
• Provide an opportunity to students to pursue further studies in any relevant area of business management.

SPECIALIZATION OUTCOMES

After successful completion of the Major, the student will be able to:

• Demonstrate basic knowledge in accounting, economics, finance, management, entrepreneurship, and marketing in application of concepts and theories. 
• Integrate the concepts of the core areas of business and apply it in various contexts.
• Understand the importance of ethics in business activities.
• Demonstrate an ability to conduct research related to general business or to a specific business function.
• Deeper understanding of issues that fall under some or all areas of finance, marketing, analytics, operations, entrepreneurship and human resources
• Holistic interdisciplinary understanding of various disciplines to address issues and solve problems

COURSES (CORE AND ELECTIVE)

MAJOR COURSES

 Introduction to operations research

The course exposes students to fundamental optimization procedures and techniques to attain skills at structuring business problems and modelling them as a mathematical program, microsoft excel to solve such models, interpret solutions and use the solutions to answer the business problem. The focus of this course will be on applications of quantitative methods in modelling business situations.

Introduction to finance and accounting

The course is aimed at baptizing the students to the vocabularies of accounting theories and practices. Beginning with the accounting concepts, introducing the basic tenets in maintaining the books of accounts, the course finally culminates into the preparation of the financial statements like income statement, balance sheet as well as the cash flow statement. It also covers the bank reconciliation statement and bills of exchange.

Consumers and markets

This course provides a conceptual framework to the students to understand the various dimensions of marketing as a discipline. It focuses on exploring various aspects of marketing, markets, consumers, their shopping behaviour and motivations. It gives broad understanding of the exciting world of shop, shopping and shopper.

Introduction to people management

This course introduces the basic context, concepts and importance of people management in organizations to students. It incorporates application of psychological and sociological concepts to provide understanding about how people work in organizations. The course familiarizes students with the fundamental ideas of organizational behavior and human resource management and prepares them for the advanced courses under the specialisation. It is designed as an essential first course for students of management and entrepreneurship, to familiarise them with the practices of managing people in organizations.

Introduction to entrepreneurship & family business

This course introduces students to entrepreneurship and family businesses. It provides an overview on how they come into being, their perspective on the ecosystem, their mindset and how they manage their enterprises.

Introduction to spreadsheet modelling

This course deals with the use of the spreadsheet to solve managerial problems. It merely highlights the use of microsoft excel as an aid in formulating business problems and invoking appropriate functions to resolve them.

Introduction to quantitative methods

This course is designed to give undergraduate students an introduction to decision making. The use of quantitative techniques is increasingly being adopted in all areas of human endeavour. The need to collect, analyze and interpret mathematical output is increasingly being appreciated for arriving at conclusions or in strategic decision making. This course will deal with fundamental concepts required to model, analyse and solve quantitative problems arising in any discipline. A student undertaking this course can have little to no formal introduction to mathematics and statistics at the higher secondary level.

Managerial economics

This course provides a foundation of economic theories and models for use in managerial decision-making. The course provides students with an overview of theories of demand, supply, production and competition and equips them with the tools and techniques to make effective economic decisions under different business environments.

Accounting for managers

Financial accounting provides the means of recording and reporting financial information in a business. Accounting plays a vital role as an information system for monitoring, problem solving and decision-making. This course provides the fundamentals of financial accounting and goes on to demonstrate how accounting fits into the overall business environment of an organization. In addition to this, management accounting systems, which have a strong internal focus can be effective tools in providing information that is useful in decision making at all levels in the organization. Management accountants play a strategic role in developing and providing both financial and non-financial information that is critical to the success of an organization.

Marketing management

This course provides a conceptual framework to the students to understand the function of marketing in an organization. The course helps students to apply the marketing concepts and theories to solve case studies and projects. The course makes them vigilant of the marketing happenings in the real world and therefore importance of creating effective marketing strategies.

Organisational behavior

This course is an introduction to organizational behaviour for undergraduates. It discusses behaviour in organizations at individual, group & organizational levels and provides an understanding of the underlying aspects that drive behavior. It provides insights into the different theories and their application in the organizational context. It also enables students to understand the utilisation of different tools and practices in directing individual actions towards organizational objectives.

Research methods in management

The objective of the course is to enable students to understand the role and importance of research in improving managerial decisions when faced with uncertainty. Research methods are applied in all functional areas of business viz. Operation management, accounting, finance and marketing. The issue facing managers is not a shortage of information but how to use the available information to make better decisions. Learning this course helps students recognise that data are inherently variable and that the identification measurement, control, and reduction of variation provide opportunities for quality improvement.

Financial management

This course in financial management provides a detailed understanding of the finance function and its interrelationship with other areas of business. It seeks to develop the foundation for financial management concepts. It primarily helps the student to understand how businesses make investment, financing, working capital management and dividend decisions and what are the key factors that influence these decisions.

Design thinking for managers

Design thinking (dt) is a powerful tool to tackle the unstructured & the unknown. Dt is a ‘human centered’ approach to problem solving which emerged at stanford in the 1960’s primarily as a systematic, immersive approach to product design. In recent years, it was found that these approaches can be extended to a wide category of ill-structured, real-world problems, both in emerging and developed markets alike. Dt is getting increasingly popular not only across top corporates, but also in rural, semi-urban and underserved sections of society. Given the diversity of challenges that we face today, it therefore becomes necessary to have thinkers and doers who can focus on addressing such challenges. Dt helps in building those capabilities.

Business ethics and corporate governance

The course aims to develop in the student a clear perspective on the role and responsibilities of business in society. It helps the student understand the role of ethics in business. It also dwells on corporate governance frameworks and their relevance to contemporary business environment.

Negotiations

We negotiate every day. We negotiate with potential employers, coworkers, roommates, landlords, parents, bosses, merchants, service providers, spouses, and even our children. What price we want to pay, how much we want to be paid, who will do the dishes … all of these are negotiations. Yet, although people negotiate all the time, most know very little about the strategy and psychology of effective negotiations. Why do we sometimes get our way whereas other times we walk away feeling frustrated by our inability to obtain the agreement we desire?

Negotiation is the art and science of securing agreements between two or more interdependent parties. This course is designed to be relevant to a broad spectrum of negotiation problems that are faced by the manager and the professional. It is also designed to complement the technical and diagnostic skills learned in other courses. A basic premise of this course is that while a manager needs analytical skills to develop optimal solutions to problems, a broad array of negotiation skills is needed in order for these solutions to be accepted and implemented.

Business innovation, entrepreneurship and strategy

The course is designed to expose the student to innovation and its application in entrepreneurship. Today it is the use of innovation in entrepreneurship that makes companies to sustain and pose a threat for competitors. This course will enable students to understand the dynamic nature of the environment and the need for being innovative. In this course, the emphasis is not on filling in frameworks. On the contrary, students will be taught to exhibit unconventional thinking and link it to entrepreneurship. The practical and interwoven theoretical nature of class deliberations will cull out the deeper understanding of entrepreneurship. This course enables a student to understand the role of innovation at different fronts such as product, process, business model etc.