A Run

Module 1 finally got completed with the presentation on Monday. Tuesday was our day off to prepare for module 2 that commenced on Wednesday. This module will take us through the core business foundations of cross enterprise leadership, i.e., strategy, accounting and finance. We started with a strategy case on Wall-Mart where almost all the functional-silos were covered. There were professors from Strategy, Finance, Accounting, Marketing, Operations and IT, team-facilitating the discussion around the case. We learnt about value proposition, achieving cost leadership, macroeconomic perspectives, competitive advantage, etc from Strategy’s view; Accounting Professor introduced as how to measure the performance of the strategy using numbers; Marketing professor on branding, market segmenting, competition, etc; Managing flows that create value from operations’ perspective; IT on the importance of leveraging technology in a complex organization like Wal-Mart and finally, Finance perspectives on performance ratios, inflation, interest rates, etc. On the whole, Wal-Mart highlighted the integrated behavior of various disciplines to create values in the firm. Cross Enterprise Leadership’s business intelligence seems to have started taking its shape in this module.

The Accounting cases introduced us to basic accounting fundamentals and accounting standards. Finance case on Friday, equipped us with the size-up techniques in order to analyze a business from a manager’s perspective to improve processes within the organization (or) a banker’s perspective to make a decision on say, loans.

Module 2 seems to be promising!!!