USEK Business School

This course provides the training needed for understanding, testing, conducting and writing a research paper in social sciences and management. It aims at helping students understand the stakes, the basics and the techniques of research in management by offering the tools for the personal development of their work.

Business and academic professionals will present within the scope of various current events at the level of finance, management and marketing, in order to illustrate and complete the students’ training program.

Business and academic professionals will present within the scope of various current events at the level of finance, management and marketing, in order to illustrate and complete the student's training program.

Business and academic professionals will present within the scope of various current events at the level of finance, management and marketing, in order to illustrate and complete the student's training program.

Managers make decisions based on various sources of information, one of which is the accounting system that produces financial information. The end products of this system are financial statements prepared according to a standardized set of rules. The first part of the course is designed to give students a general knowledge of the most important international standards used in financial reporting. The second part of the course focuses on management accounting. A key role for management accountants is to establish the control systems used to achieve organizational goals and minimize risks. One of the most important of these is budgetary control, a powerful tool that encourages planning, sets milestones, evaluates performance and suggests paths for improvement. The objective of this part of the course is to help students understand the role and functioning of the budget.

The course will focus on the problems a financial manager faces. In particular, students will examine how to obtain adequate funds to allow a firm to operate and how to decide on their optimal allocation. To obtain funds, the financial manager must participate in markets for debt and equity securities. Thus, we will discuss how these markets work and how they can be most efficiently used by the firm. In allocating funds, we will learn how to assess the economic benefits of long­ lived projects and how to make optimal choices between projects. We will also spend time developing basic financial tools that will assist us in the decision­-making process.

The course objective is to present quantitative tools used in practice to support decisions, as well as the management situations to which they apply. Using stylized cases, students will learn to recognize several types of decision­-making problems, express them as mathematical models and identify the appropriate techniques to solve them. Special attention is given to prescriptive models, which help identify the best management decisions. At the end of the course, students will have gained a basic knowledge of the main techniques involved for these decision support models. This will allow them to deal with current problems of decision-making with the help of specialized software attached to Microsoft Excel.

The course explores the economic, political, social and cultural challenges that pertain to any organization, thus introducing participants to the world of the manager. It covers the basic functions of management, namely strategic planning, organizing and structuring, and leading and controlling. In the process, students will be exposed to the challenges of international and intercultural management, innovation, management of creative enterprises and knowledge management. The course reviews different aspects of existing organizations, such as marketing, finance, accounting and human resources. New issues introduced include sustainable development, corporate social responsibility, corporate ethics and governance.

The underlying premise of the course is that Human Resources Management (HRM) is a responsibility shared by both HR specialists and the managers of firms. HRM is viewed as a key component of business strategy and as a potential source of competitive advantage. The course highlights the numerous challenges facing today’s firms: growing pressures for continuous productivity improvement, better quality goods and services, more flexible production systems and changing employee expectations. These pressures are straining the traditional HRM model and leading to a realignment of HR practices and the restructuring of relationships among the firm’s major players, including executives, managers, employees and unions. This course is designed for managers, as they often do not have access to a human resources department, but must still manage human resources in all activities ranging from planning, recruitment and selection to performance evaluation, compensation and development of competencies.

The ability to manage and use information in the pursuit of business objectives is an important managerial skill. Developing this skill requires an understanding of information technologies, the competencies and processes used to manage these technologies, such as, the governance of information systems, and the collection, manipulation and analysis of operational data. The course will focus on three critical technologies: data management, integrated systems and business intelligence. Students will examine the management and use of these technologies, their relationships to one another and the responsibilities of managers in their application. Participants will be asked to design the essential elements of an information system to support the implementation of a particular business initiative.

Students who intend to work in the area of trade and international business development must have some essential points of reference in order to achieve a successful career. This course is intended to provide students with these essential points of reference. As such, its objectives for students are: to understand the international business environment in which firms operate, to evaluate opportunities and challenges faced by firms in the global and competitive environment of prominent emerging markets in which domestic and multinational firms currently operate, to analyze national and international policies with regard to globalization, trade and firm growth, to differentiate between domestic and multinational business strategies, to understand the important place of consensus in international business, and to develop a corporate social responsibility policy in this context. This course will help students achieve these objectives; concrete cases will be presented in order to facilitate their understanding of the fundamental concepts taught in the course.

The course will help students to develop skills required to carry out the activities and responsibilities associated with leading and managing people. The skills that students will learn, practice and develop in this course concern the task of overseeing the work of others. The focus is on the ways a manager can exercise authority and in different contexts; the emphasis is primarily on action and practice. The course addresses the skills required in order to succeed in the following four broad domains: exercising authority, communication skills, political skills and team leadership. Students will be asked to react to concrete situations involving the management of people. Case discussions will be supplemented with practical exercises.

Contemporary organizations have to deal with rapidly changing environments. The globalization of the economy forces organizations to seriously reconsider the design as well as the deployment of the organization itself. Public as well as private organizations throughout the world are living laboratories of this phenomenon. Confronted with market deregulation, privatization, global competition, achievement of world­ class practice and rapidly changing technologies, institutions that want to survive in their field must adjust constantly. This adjustment requires that private companies and even state­-owned companies constantly re­examine the chosen organizational models. They are more and more confronted with reorganizations, new partnerships, out­ sourcing and all other types of organizational transformation. Moreover, it becomes evident that this redeployment of organizations goes far beyond their simple reconfiguration. It requires that managers of these organizations develop specific competencies concerning the implementation of major changes. These changes often have significant social and political effects, which managers must be able to identify and handle.

Managers must organize, sell under competitive constraints and make profits. The aim of the course is to shed light on these responsibilities by providing students with an analytical grasp of the conduct of individuals and organizations, based on the incentives and the constraints present in the market place. Topics covered include market demand, product differentiation, costs, size and design of firms, market economics, and competition; and situations will be examined for each topic covered. Students will have to examine the situation of particular Lebanese firms with respect to the major themes covered in the course.

Marketing is an applied science built on the foundations of economic, behavioral and management sciences. It is associated with a large number of topics, concepts, theories and examples. The objectives of the course are to demystify the terminology, concepts and theories, to understand and apply marketing management principles, and to develop the analytical and decision skills required in a competitive marketplace. The course will present this material within a systematic framework so that students will be able to link the different subjects and understand the relationships between marketing research, consumer behavior, market segmentation, targeting, product positioning, distribution channels and promotion alternatives.

The course is an introduction to negotiation as a management tool used by individuals in and between organizations. It focuses on learning the main models of negotiation. The primary goal of this course is to give an opportunity to critically evaluate current strengths and weaknesses in relation to negotiation so that students can develop a personal toolkit of effective negotiation skills, strategies, and approaches. A related aim is to provide them with a broad intellectual understanding of concepts central to the scientific research on negotiation. In concrete terms, the students will be required to experience negotiation within various contexts.

Business firms face constant pressure in a rapidly evolving competitive environment. Succeeding in this context requires an understanding of strategies and of the needs to reinvest in the firm’s strategic position. Two main objectives are pursued in the course. First, to introduce students to the fundamentals of strategy, for instance its formulation and its implementation. Building on these foundations, the second objective is to gain a thorough understanding of strategy execution. Two approaches will be favored: case studies to illustrate the foundations of business strategy, and a simulation to put students in a position to strategically manage an organization. This simulation allows them to raise issues related to the formulation, implementation and execution of the strategy.

This course tackles the main skills students need to understand, assess, conduct and write research in social sciences in general and business sciences in particular. The course consists of a general introduction aimed at developing research stakes, foundations and techniques in management sciences, to allow students to deepen their reflection.