3 semester credits

The purpose of this capstone course is to facilitate the integration of what students have experienced during their Executive MBA program. First, working with an executive mentor, students complete a Personal and Professional Development Plan that has both charted their transformational journey thus far and will serve as the starting point of the next phase of their career development. Second, students seek to integrate the knowledge they have gained through the program using the "lens" of developing business strategies capable of achieving sustainable competitive advantage.

To help students think in an integrative fashion, they will take the perspective of the CEO throughout the course. Students whose primary experience has been in one of the functional areas of management (e.g., finance, marketing) have opportunities to relate their experience to the contents of other functional areas and to develop the multifunctional perspective required of the general manager.

The most important outcome of the course is that students are able to think and act in a strategic (rather than a tactical) fashion. Overall, the course aims to improve the actual practice of management; i.e., the students' ability to manage a variety of strategic and operational situations. These situations may be complex, and students should be able to cope with a considerable amount of ambiguity.