The 360º Corporation

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Sarah Kaplan

Distinguished Professor; Professor of Strategic Management; Director, Institute for Gender and the Economy

Why this course

  • The 360º Corporation uniquely dives deep into a single corporation, using ethnographic field trips, self-reflections, in-class debates, guest speakers and carefully curated multimedia resources to immerse students in the trade-offs, and opportunities, created by companies’ business models

  • Students exercise holistically examining business practice and broadening the lens beyond the walls of the firm. In this intensive course, Professor Kaplan’s creative approach connects MBA core concepts in a way that equips students with the skills needed to more fully assess, challenge and impact the organizations that they will be a part of throughout their career

 
 

Course Trailer


Course Highlights

Learning outcomes:

  • Integrate across multiple functional perspectives to understand complex business problems

  • Understand both private and public value creation and capture in the context of one corporation

  • Place yourself in the shoes of the senior executive in addressing management challenges for the corporation

  • Get practice at seeing the world through multiple lenses and in coping with the paradoxes and tensions implicit in many management issues

  • Learn to read like a manager, integrating information from multiple different sources and coming up with your own perspective

At the end of the course, students take the perspective of the leaders of the corporation and seek to understand how they can make important strategic choices for their company in the face of the many challenges and obligations we uncover in the course.

Latest Coverage

Featured
Aspen Institute Business & Society Program: Teaching Complex Management Challenges
Aspen Institute Business & Society Program: Teaching Complex Management Challenges

We spoke with Professor Kaplan about her course, and what else may be in store for Amazon in a year where the company will see a major leadership change at the top.

University of Toronto Rotman School of Business: Rotman School Professor and Course Honoured with an Ideas Worth Teaching Award from The Aspen Institute
University of Toronto Rotman School of Business: Rotman School Professor and Course Honoured with an Ideas Worth Teaching Award from The Aspen Institute

An unique MBA course, which analyzes one firm from many perspectives, taught by Prof. Sarah Kaplan at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management is one of nine business school courses honoured with a 2020 Ideas Worth Teaching Award from the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program


Biography

Sarah Kaplan is Distinguished Professor, Director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE), and Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. She is a co-author of the bestselling business book, Creative Destruction. Her latest book—The 360° Corporation: From Stakeholder Trade-offs to Transformation—is based on her award-winning course at the Rotman School. In it, she shows companies how to avoid simple “greenwashing” or “pinkwashing” in addressing corporate social responsibility. She lays out a roadmap for organizational leaders who have hit the limits of the supposed win-win of shared value to explore how companies can cope with real trade-offs, innovating around them or even thriving within them. Formerly a professor at the Wharton School (where she remains a Senior Fellow), and an innovation specialist for nearly a decade at McKinsey & Company, she holds a PhD from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.