MBA Essentials: Strategy, Finance, Marketing and Leadership

An eight-week live programme, three hours every Sunday morning, covering what an MBA teaches about running a business: strategy, financial statements, customers, operations, people, decisions and change. Built for managers who need the thinking without leaving their job for two years. Programme (8 sessions, 24 hours) 1. Strategy and business models — How a company creates value and how it keeps a share of it. Competitive position, where margin actually comes from, and why most strategy documents describe ambitions rather than choices. 2. Reading the numbers — Profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow, for managers who are not accountants. Why a profitable company runs out of money, what your own budget is doing inside the company accounts, and the handful of ratios worth knowing. 3. Customers and markets — Segmentation, positioning and pricing. Deciding who you are not for. Reading a market you are inside of, and the difference between what customers say and what they buy. 4. Operations and delivery — Process, capacity, quality and cost. Where work actually queues, why adding people slows things down, and how to find the constraint instead of optimising around it. 5. People and organisation — Leading people who do not report to you, structure and incentives, hiring, and the conversations managers avoid. What motivation research supports and what it does not. 6. Data, decisions and AI — Making a decision under uncertainty with the evidence you have. Choosing metrics that cannot be gamed, and where AI genuinely changes a manager's work rather than adding noise. 7. Innovation and change — Why transformations are delivered and not adopted. Building the case for change, sponsorship, resistance, and measuring whether anything actually changed. 8. Capstone: build and defend a business case — Take a real decision from your own organisation through the whole programme: the strategy logic, the numbers, the customer case, the delivery plan and the people impact. Present it and defend it. Session format: concepts, a worked example from a real organisation, discussion, then something to apply before the next Sunday. Key message: an MBA is not a qualification you need in order to think like a general manager. It is a set of lenses. Eight Sunday mornings is enough to learn the lenses and start using them at work on the Monday.