Military to EntrepreneurshipCornell

Certificate Program

Operating as an organization takes coordinated effort. Companies need to structure themselves in a way that supports their goals. They need to describe job duties clearly so everyone knows how their role supports those goals. They need to attract and support the right talent, and determine how employees can best influence each other to achieve their common objectives. It takes a lot of work to get — and stay — organized.

In this course, you will examine the various organizational methods that help support a chain of command. You will also analyze, describe, and specify a job position to help ensure that everyone knows how their role supports overall company goals. You will design an HR management process to recruit the right potential employees, identify the best candidates, welcome them to the organization, and support them as they work. You will describe the organizational culture of a company and determine its role in helping employees do their best work. Finally, you will describe the uses of power in organizations, as employees influence one another in pursuit of common goals. In the five-part project, you will develop an organizational brief that considers each step of organizing a firm so that you can better structure the inner workings of a company to support its goals.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Finance and Accounting Principles
• Marketing Fundamentals
• Strategic Business Planning and Forecasting

In this course, you will select the most promising customer segments to target and position a product in a way that makes it attractive to potential customers. You'll also use the Importance-Performance Model along with other analytical tools to help you choose a target segment. You will discover how to craft a product positioning statement for a Go-To-Market Plan, applying your knowledge for success.

The following courses are required to be completed before taking this course:

• Key Performance Indicators for Marketing
• The Customer Journey and Segmentation

In this course, you will see that brand activation is much more than clever communications or perfectly placed messages. You will begin developing your skills in brand activation by identifying and analyzing a brand target market and determining consumer insights that will prepare you to create an activation plan. You will then define the brand values, personality, and purpose, and craft a brand positioning statement for your selected brand. These elements help ensure the activation plan aligns with the brand. You will also write key elements of a communication brief to ensure that all messaging and communication pieces align with the brand and with each other. Finally, you will outline a marketing communications approach specific to your brand and your target market that will lend itself to successful brand activation.

Your product has been designed and you've decided it's ready for the marketplace. How will you get it into the hands of customers? This course addresses key issues associated with distribution channels, including the role of intermediaries and the type of arrangement you will have with them. You will also explore the pros and cons of online vs. offline distribution, the needs of customers as related to how you market and sell your product, and several ways in which profit margins are affected by channel decisions. To apply these skills, you will help to identify appropriate distribution channels and create a distribution plan for your product as you continue progressing your example Go-To-Market Plan.

The following courses are required to be completed before taking this course:

• Key Performance Indicators for Marketing
• The Customer Journey and Segmentation
• Targeting and Positioning
• Product Design and Testing

Your financial reward from hard work on designing a product and setting up distribution channels comes when customers make a purchase and hand over money. Setting prices that are right for your customers as well as your company is therefore a critical element of your strategy. In this course, you will explore several pricing models and discover what it takes to establish pricing levels that result in sales and enable your company to succeed. Working with your team, you will help to determine an appropriate pricing structure for your product and add a description of it to your group's Go-To-Market Plan.

The following courses are required to be completed before taking this course:

• Key Performance Indicators for Marketing
• The Customer Journey and Segmentation
• Targeting and Positioning
• Product Design and Testing
• Setting Up Distribution Channels

Seasoned project leaders sometimes apply the same leadership approach to every situation. In this course, authored by Cornell Instructor Robert Newman, you'll explore a number of leadership styles to assess their relative strengths and weaknesses. You'll learn how to manage safety concerns, when to be directly coercive, and see how creative collaboration and a shot of inspiration can turn things around for a team.

After taking this course, you'll be ready to employ a particular style or model of leadership just as a carpenter would a tool. Does the occasion call for a hammer or a saw? Every style of leadership has its merits and its place. Find out what style works best for the situation. 

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Leverage Emotional Intelligence for Project Results

Engaging your audience is arguably more difficult than ever before, and every organization is looking for insights to set them apart. In this course, you will explore the power of user experience (UX) as a method of impacting your stakeholders. You will discover how images, words, and sound grab attention, inform decisions, and trigger action. You will explore the three components of the UX design frame: experience design, information architecture, and information design. Once you are familiar with the framework, you will design the experience as you create user scenarios, user journey maps, and mood boards with S.T.A.R. moments. By the end of this course, you will have a broader perspective on the importance of UX design for storytelling and engaging your audience.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Strategic Storytelling Across Media
• Engaging Specific Stakeholders

Most managers only think about performance once a year when they have to conduct annual appraisals for their direct reports, or when things are going poorly. This course equips managers to move beyond this approach and develop an ongoing and proactive developmental process that helps their employees to perform best in their jobs. When your people are performing well, you're performing well and your organization can succeed.

Important business decisions require justification, and while we often have data that can help us make those decisions, the skill with which we analyze the data can make the difference between a good and bad outcome. This course, developed by Professor Chris Anderson, is designed to move learners beyond making decisions focused solely on averages. In this course, you will develop a working familiarity with the grounding principles of data analysis. You will learn to derive the greatest benefit possible from the data available to you while ensuring that the conclusions you draw remain valid. You will apply a decision-making framework within which you'll interact with the data to achieve the best outcome.

This course includes valuable tools and help sheets for data handlers along with the insight and perspective you need as a data consumer. While this course is not a replacement for a full-length statistics course, you will have a basic grounding in many statistics concepts by the time the course is over. You should be able to complete this course without any prior knowledge of statistics.

Project Management Institute (PMI^®) Continuing Certification: Participants who successfully complete this course will receive 6 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from PMI^®. Please contact PMI ^® for details about professional project management certification or recertification. PMI is a registered mark of the Project Management Institute, Inc.

Summary statistics are one way to forecast uncertain outcomes, and the statistical results can be used to make decisions or guide strategy. Since summary statistics are based on a data sample, they typically inform intuitive decision-making. That is, the model requires interpretation which relies on the business intuition of the person using it.

You'll learn how to examine sample data scientifically to limit any generalizations to only the patterns that have the strongest statistical support. As always, intuition and business knowledge play an important role in the process, but this course will prepare you to apply a level of scientific rigor that will lead to better results. 

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Understanding and Visualizing Data

When trying to persuade someone, the tendency is to begin in advocacy mode—for example: “Here's something I want you to agree to.” Most people do not react positively to the feeling of being sold something. The usual reaction is to literally or figuratively start backing up. To make a convincing case, it is more effective to engage with the decision maker as a partner in problem-solving. This makes your counterpart feel less like someone is trying to get them to buy something and more like you are working together to bring about an outcome that is desirable to both parties. Begin by asking yourself: “What is the problem you and the decision maker are solving together?”

By the end of this course, you will have learned how to deeply analyze a problem, possible solutions, and the associated risks as well as the most persuasive and efficient ways of presenting your proposal.

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Solve Problems Using Evidence and Critical Thinking

Have you ever known a very intelligent person who made a very bad decision? If so, you know that having a high IQ does not guarantee that you automatically make critically thoughtful decisions. Critically thoughtful problem-solving is a discipline and a skill—one that allows you to make decisions that are the product of careful thought, and the results of those decisions help your team and organization thrive.

In this course you will practice a disciplined, systematic approach to problem solving that helps ensure that your analysis of a problem is comprehensive, is based on quality, credible evidence, and takes full and fair account of the most probable counterarguments and risks. The result of this technique is a thoroughly defensible assessment of what the problem is, what is causing it, and the most effective plan of action to address it. Finally, you will identify and frame a problem by assessing its context and develop a well-reasoned and implementable solution that addresses the underlying causes.

Whether you need to tackle a complex project, communicate more effectively, rethink your organization or your job, solve world hunger, or figure out your teenager, systems thinking can help you. All of these are complex and challenging real-world problems, sometimes called wicked problems. We all confront problems, big and small, in our personal and professional lives, and most of us are searching for better ways to solve them. In this course, Professors Derek and Laura Cabrera will demonstrate how we can use systems thinking to solve everyday and wicked problems, to transform our organizations, and to increase our personal effectiveness.

At its core, systems thinking attempts to better align the way we think with how the real world works. Our thinking is based on our mental models, but these models, created from our unique perspective with its inherent biases, are usually inadequate representations of reality. The Cabreras illustrate how we can use feedback to recognize and adapt our mental models so that they better align with reality, enhancing our problem-solving capabilities.

For systems thinking to be successful, it must be adaptive. In this course, you will explore the concept of complex adaptive systems, and while these systems seem unnecessarily complicated, the Cabreras will reveal a surprising discovery. Underlying all complex adaptive systems are simple rules, and applying these rules is the key to transforming the way we frame and solve everyday problems.

If you're in charge of developing and leading strategic organizational change, there are certain tools and concepts you must be familiar with. In this course, the emphasis is on cultivating your ability to assess the need for change. By determining why your organization or team needs change, you'll be able to better answer questions like: What should you change and how should the change be handled? You will explore the political and complex process of introducing change, which includes motivating others, dealing with resistance and the emotional elements of change, and finally, extending change over time and sustaining it. The course is designed to give you practice so you can initiate and carry out a change effort.