San Diego State University

College of Business Administration

Instructor: Assoc. Professor Craig P. Dunn, Ph.D.

Office: SS 3406

Office Hours: 6:00-7:00 M, 3:00-4:00 pm T, and by appointment

Phone: 594-5783 (office/voicemail)

COURSE DESCRIPTION: The primary goal of the organizational management course is to enhance students' knowledge and skills in leading and designing community economic development oganizations through focusing on issues of corporate governance, ethics, and meaningful work.

What is the CED organization? Do such organizations-and more particularly the managers who represent them-have any responsibilities beyond seeking to provide public benefits? How ought CED organizations to be structured for maximum social and ethical effectiveness? What does it mean to be effective as an organization, and how is the concept of effectiveness related to efficiency? These and other related questions provide the `grist' for this segment of the CED certificate program.

This course is designed to be a challenging and exciting inclusion within your course of study. Two major themes will provide direction throughout the course: organizational governance and the meaning of public sector service. There is not a specific set of skills serving to lead you through the course, and no unifying meta-theory to inform your decisions. The problems and issues raised embrace the entire spectrum of business and management disciplines. Many variables and situational factors must be dealt with at once; weighing the `pros and cons' of a particular course of action necessitates a total enterprise -- if not a total societal -- perspective.

The overriding pedagogical objective is to sharpen your abilities to think critically and to diagnose situations from an organizational and societal perspective. Accomplishing this objective entails introducing you to a broad range of decision-making frameworks. Application of such models of reasoning necessarily takes account of the complexities and constraints imposed by the environment in which the organization operates, why the environment must be attended to, and how it affects the 'character' of decisions. Social theory will also be explored as the role of the public and not-for-profit sectors in creating the `good society' is examined.

During this course each student will be required to articulate and defend his/her perspective on organizational reality; i.e., whose interests do you represent, and how does this perspective 'connect' with both the purpose of the organization for which you work as well as with your own personal purpose?

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

1. To increase your understanding of the tasks of the `ideal' manager;
2. To develop the capacity to identify salient issues and to reason carefully about options;
3. To build skills in conducting decision analysis in `messy' situations;
4. To improve your ability to manage organizational processes;
5. To integrate and extend upon the knowledge gained in earlier CED courses;
6. To convince the student of the essential role of corporate social responsibility in the conduct of business enterprise;
7. To apply and/or implement the principles and concepts of moral reasoning through case analysis; and perhaps most importantly
8. To better equip the student to integrate his/her personal purpose with a successful managerial career.

READINGS: Several readings are assigned, most of which are included in a course readings packet. These include:

1) Harris, Margaret, "Clarifying the board role: A total activities approach," in Dennis R. Young, Robert M. Hollister, Virginia A Hodgkinson, and Associates (Eds), Governing, leading, and managing nonprofit organizations: New insights from research and practice, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993, pp. 17-31;
2) Steve Mariotti and NFTE, Harvard Business School Case (9-391-169), 1991;
3) Young, Dennis R., "Emerging themes in nonprofit leadership and management," in Dennis R. Young, Robert M. Hollister, Virginia A Hodgkinson, and Associates (Eds), Governing, leading, and managing nonprofit organizations: New insights from research and practice, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993, pp. 1-13;
4) Zander, Alvin F., Making boards effective: The dynamics of nonprofit governing boards, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993 (pp. 1-74); and
5) Collins, James, What Comes Next, Inc. Magazine, September 1997, pp. 40 ff.