The Mini-MBA

Course overview

Why choose the ‘Mini-MBA’ written self-study course?

Few people can lavish the time or the money on a full-blown MBA course. However, that doesn’t mean that you have to miss out: the new self-study ‘Mini-MBA’ offers you a special twelve module concentrated course covering key skills and techniques taught to full time MBA students and it is brought to you in weekly mailed instalments during the twelve-week period of the course.

This distance learning course will:

• Advance your strategic planning with current tools, techniques and thinking
• Boost your leadership ability
• Improve your financial awareness to have a direct impact on the bottom line
• Update your knowledge of key strategic marketing tactics
• Get-to-grips with the key deliverables of successful project management
• Practically focus on the essential theory, practice and techniques of an MBA
• Save one or even two years and the huge costs involved in enrolling for a traditional MBA course

Structured to fit into your working day

The course is designed to fit around your current commitments with each module requiring an average study time of up to 3 to 4 hours. Course materials can be sent to you anywhere in the world and offer the flexibility of studying at work, at home or on the move, while having access to confidential help and support from our experts.

Plus receive a 30% discount off Falconbury’s Mini ‘Executive-MBA’

As an option, you are entitled and encouraged to attend Falconbury’s Mini ‘Executive-MBA’ in the UK in February, June and October 2009 – an ideal opportunity to further enhance your skills and knowledge, again with the emphasis on techniques of practical relevance to your everyday working life provided by a superb faculty of speakers.

Course modules

Module 1: Managing yourself and others – Part 1

• First learn to master yourself
• Performance management
• Communicate and motivate
• Effective coaching
• Tackling poor performers

Module 2: Managing yourself and others – Part 2

• Managing your team
• ... And also your time
• Ensure that all meetings are positive
• How to be assertive, not aggressive

Module 3: Learn to be a leader – Part 1

• What do we mean by management?
• A survey of leadership styles
  • Sun-Tzu – The art of warfare [for executives]
  • Sensitive leadership
  • Exemplary leadership
  • Inspirational leadership
• The leader as mentor
  • Transforming organisations
  • The leader as coach
  • Coaching in action

Module 4: Learn to be a leader – Part 2

• The processes of decision making
• The realities of problem analysis
• Different personalities – different leadership – different decisions
• Integrating the key players and mobilising the effort
• Building a champion team
• What distinguishes successful, high-achieving teams?
• ‘Drivers’ profile

Module 5: Strategy is the key – Part 1

• The keys to business success
• Techniques of strategic analysis
  • Environmental mapping
  • Industry mapping
  • SWOT analysis
  • Root cause analysis
• Effective market analysis

Module 6: Strategy is the key – Part 2

• The volume – cost – profit relationship
• Mastering option appraisal
  • Force field analysis
  • Stakeholder analysis
  • Identifying financial sensitivity and evaluating risk exposure
  • Evaluating business development options
  • ‘AID’ analysis
• Monitoring and managing performance
  • Key performance indicators: strategic, financial
  • City key performance indicators

Module 7: Master marketing – Part 1

• How marketing works
• Customers’ needs
• Choosing your customers: market selection
• Segmentation
• The marketing mix: what ‘products’ are
• Marketing pricing
• The product life cycle
• Marketing pricing strategies

Module 8: Master marketing – Part 2

• Getting to market – distribution
• Managing the distribution channel
• Effective promotion and communication
• Understanding marketing communications
• The role of advertising and promotion
• The marketing plan
  • The marketing programme
  • The marketing audit
  • Control mechanisms
  • Building the budget

Module 9: Demystifying finance – Part 1

• Understand basic accounts
  • Profit and loss
  • Balance sheet
  • Assets and liabilities
• How to analyse performance
  • Balance sheet measures
  • Finance ratios
• Working capital management
• Detailed case study
• External analysis: the press
  • Understanding the stock market, PE’s, yields and market cap

Module 10: Demystifying finance – Part 2

• Accounting principles
  • Fixed assets and depreciation
  • Long-term liabilities
  • Owner’s equity
  • Notes to the accounts
• The budget
• Setting a budget
• Reviewing a budget
  • Zero-based budgeting
  • Monitoring your budget
• Management accounting

Module 11: Demystifying finance – Part 3

• Analysing costs
  • Break-even
  • Building up costs
  • Decision-making and golden rules
• Making sense of the future – techniques for decision making
  • Rate of return and pay-back period
  • Time value of money
  • Discounted cash flow

Module 12: Successful project management

• What’s it all about?
• The early stages of a project
  • Invitation to tender
  • Proposals
  • Negotiating
• Building a rock-solid plan
  • Schedules and budgets
  • The project plan
• ... Making sure it sticks: follow through
  • Delivering the goods
  • Evaluation

Course contributors

Ian Ruskin-Brown has been the owner/entrepreneur of several service businesses, a course director at the Chartered Institute of Marketing for courses on Marketing in the service sector and has designed, written and piloted in-company training courses on marketing and selling consultancy services for a number of blue chip companies. He currently runs the Marketing Your Services course for Management Center Europe and client specific courses in the USA and South East Asia.

Michael Williams is an international management consultant. His main clients include leading business schools as well as several universities and a wide range of companies throughout Europe and North America. He is the author, or co-author, of many books in the fields of leadership, management practice and organisational psychology.

Mark A Thomas is an international business consultant, author and speaker specialising in business planning, managing change, human resource management and executive development. Based in London, Mark works across the globe – he has worked in over 40 different countries and is a frequent conference and seminar speaker on business, organisation and human resource issues.

Stephen Brookson is an independent consultant, and specialises in the provision of practical business development consultancy and training programmes. He qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1980 and his experience includes working with Ernst & Young as a consultant.

Paul Elkin provides consultancy services with a particular focus on business strategic development, performance management and corporate image. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. After many years in a range of senior management roles in both public and private sector industry with UK and US businesses plus time with Price Waterhouse, he formed the TMMi group at the end of 1989.

Cathy Lake MA (Oxon) is a freelance editor, writer and project manager. During the past two decades, she has taken part in, and also managed, almost every aspect of the publishing process. She has worked for most of the major national publishers and has written about 40 training manuals and textbooks. As well as writing for commercial publishers in the UK and abroad she has also written management development workbooks for corporate clients.

Past delegates’ comments

‘The Fast-Track MBA’ dovetails well with the written Mini-MBA – for me there were certainly benefits of doing both.

Chris Brown, Managing Director, Nicholls & Christopher Ltd

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Client portfolio

Our client portfolio for this course includes the following companies:

A Bilbrough & Co Ltd	Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council	R Durtnell & Sons Ltd
AAK UK Ltd	European Vending Association aisbl	Roxtec Ltd
APL Co Germany	GAC Services Ltd	SABIC Japan Ltd
Affitech AS	Galpharm International	SC Romaero SA
Aker Kvaerner Netherlands BV	Gertsen-Olufsen AS	SHB
Alan Dick & Co Ltd	Hertford Cardiology	Sanoffi Aventis Ltd
Applied Technology	JADRAN-Galenic laboratory Rijeka	Solvay Pharmaceuticals
BMT Marine Projects Ltd	Jacobs France	Sonangol EP
BTG	KBR	Sun Pharmaceutical Sdn Bhd
Bedfordshire & Luton Mental Health & Social Care NHS Partnership Trust	Kingspan Ltd	Sunrise Ltd
Blandford Leisure Centre	Kongsberg Maritime	TIBCO Software Inc
Bristow Caribbean Ltd	Lundbeck Austria GmbH	Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH
CEREP	M-I SWACO	Vernon Carus Ltd
CIGNA International	Marshall Amplification Plc	Vetark Professional
Centaur Grain Ltd	Newham 6th Form College	Vetrotech Saint-Gobain UK Ltd
CommScope	Nicholls & Christopher Ltd	Warwickshire County Council
Crown Lifts Ltd	Palram Industries Ltd	Wirebird Ltd

More information

The following documents are available for this course:

• Sample module [133kb]

Academy of Distance Learning in Business

ADLiB

The Academy for Distance Learning in Business (ADLiB1) has developed out of Falconbury’s pioneering work on short-course management and professional development.

As with the face-to-face training we do in our public and in-house programmes, our focus is on the practical and application-rich skills and techniques, which will enable individuals to develop their full potential as managers and professionals.

Our approach to distance learning is to use the self-study method at its best to make sure that you can flexibly acquire the knowledge and understanding of each chosen area in a way that suits you and your current work commitments.

ADLiB was set up to give a consistent approach across different subject areas, so that its users would know that our rigorous standards of excellence would be met in each course.

Every programme and each of the component modules is a combination of the training and learning expertise of Falconbury and input from its wide range of practically skilled writers and trainers. Where a course bears the ADLiB logo, you can be sure that our (and your) exacting standards will be met.

To learn more about how ADLiB and the courses can help you and/or your business call +44 (0)20 7729 6677

¹ ADLiB is the Academy for Distance Learning in Business and offers ‘best in class’, flexible self-study in key business, management and leadership via distance learning modules delivered directly to you, to work through at your convenience.

Ad lib is from the Latin ad libitum meaning ‘at one’s pleasure’ – we aim to make management and professional development enjoyable as well as worthwhile.

Ad lib could also be a loose latin short-form of ‘to the library’ – but in our case, we save you that trouble by using the best material available to us on each topic and assembled to give you maximum benefit.