Financial Management in Turbulent Times

This course will enable you to

• Think about how financial aspects can be managed, with particular reference to the greater importance now attached to the customer dimension, and to the popularity of more devolved structures.
• Consider the irrelevance of many academic hypotheses (like efficient markets and capital assets pricing) and find an alternative approach to establishing decision-making criteria and your communication within a multi-product/market organisation structure, so as to assess value and ensure accountability.
• Move away from the "command and compliance" style of management towards the "trust and commitment" one; its connection with the need to balance the interests of various stakeholders, and the pressure for greater CSR.
• Examine how investment appraisal techniques are being adapted so as to cope with a greater degree of uncertainty and an increase in the proportion of investment which produces intangible assets – coupled with a practical approach to the monitoring of investments, strategies and businesses.
• Look at your relations with customers and suppliers, and how they have changed. This will be with particular reference to credit and stock controls, the inappropriateness of traditional approaches, eg reliance on customers' published accounts, and the importance of thinking globally.

About the course

Many of the techniques that underpin financial management were developed in conditions of stability. Yet the more recently, we've seen increasing and unprecedented turbulence.

This new peer-enriched learning course focuses on the dynamics of financial management. You will be prompted to think through how the volatility which characterises today’s business environment has affected your particular enterprise, and how you are, or might be, responding.