Strategic Leadership and Foresight

Explores contemporary human resource development theories and management strategies for the purposes of attracting, retaining, and empowering key internal workforces and volunteers to achieve organizational goals with a positive person-job fit. Topics include: defining HRD, roles of individual and organizational development, career development, performance management, HRD consulting and leaders, HRD analysis and evaluation, instructional design, learning acquisition and transfer, strategic partnerships and positioning, financial assessment process and results from HRD investments, calculating performance value, cost, and benefit, forecasting financial benefits with approximations and reporting findings to management.

Provides an inter-disciplinary approach to examining psychological, anthropological, physiological, geographical, geopolitical, and sociological perspectives of leadership theory. Topics include: cultural dimensions, respectful organizational pluralism, cultural intelligence, cultural values, best practices in HRD, strategy, and programs in a global context.

Exposes and familiarizes students with the diffusion of innovation theory and its conceptual framework.  Topics include: the five established adopter categories, stages of innovation, and limitations of diffusion of innovation.

Directs students as they incorporate the use of consulting principles in organizational operations. Topics include identifying potential vulnerabilities in client operations, creating a plan to leverage human capital and other resources to mitigate potential threats, and assisting clients in implementing plans to optimize organizational performance in both domestic and global environments.

Provides students with change management practices in organizations. Topics include identifying change opportunities, developing a change management plan, creating a response to unexpected change movements, and mitigating the results of change events.

Equips students to develop a resilient organization. Topics include: employment of strategic planning to assess an organization’s current social and operational resilience, evaluate environmental threats to organizational health and resilience, and develop strategies to strengthen social and operational resilience through human and relationship capital development.

Guides students with analytical approaches to assessing the strategic plan. Topics include: balanced scorecard theory; measurement of processes, people, and information; strategy map; the development of a balanced scorecard with the Triple Bottom Line including people, planet, and profit.