Columbia Management Essentials (Online)
Columbia Management Essentials (Online)
Overview
Columbia Management Essentials (Online) is a three-month online program that teaches the core pillars of management — leading teams, creating a customer-centric organization, and developing financial acumen.
The program enables participants to accelerate their impact through an intensive learning journey that will equip them to manage people, products, and projects more effectively. The key components of this MBA-inspired curriculum are:
- Enhancing leadership effectiveness
- Effective decision making
- Influencing others
- Customer-centric marketing
- Developing financial intuition
- Launching new products
- Leading and managing teams
- Building social capital
With a focus on immediate application, participants work on a capstone case study, individual and team assignments, cases, self assessments — including Columbia Business School’s proprietary 360 Assessment Tool — and group discussions, applying their learnings immediately to their unique contexts.
Participants will also be part of a powerful learning community comprising a diverse group of fellow participants from a broad range of industries, functions, experiences, and geographies.
Please contact our partners at Emeritus at columbia@emeritus.org, +1 315-982-5094 or +1 315-277-2746 for a personal conversation to learn more.
Delivered in collaboration with
“To get ahead in today's business world and solve integrated, multi-faceted problems, leaders need to possess foundational business tools. At the end of this program, participants will be able to make decisions on business challenges that cut across different functions and geographies.”
Gita Johar
Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business at Columbia Business School
Impact
You will emerge from Columbia Management Essentials (Online) with enhanced cross-functional skills and a sharpened leadership toolkit that will help you accelerate the impact on your organization.
At the end of the program, you will be able to:
- Identify your strengths and weaknesses as a leader with the 360 Assessment Tool
- Understand how different leadership styles affect performance
- Make decisions in a more systematic way to optimize results
- Influence others in a fair and ethical manner
- Develop a customer-centric mindset and find the right product for the right market
- Understand key financial concepts such as time value of money, net present value, and capital budgets for a stronger financial intuition
- Build a healthy social network to support your professional goals
Upon completion of this program, you will earn two credits towards a Certificate with select alumni and tuition benefits. Learn more.
Program Structure
Duration: 12 Weeks
Time Commitment: 4–6 hours/week
This immersive program takes an integrated approach to learning, combining live and recorded lectures, small group assignments, case studies, role plays, and Columbia Business School's 360 Assessment Tool.
The Learning Journey

The program is comprised of the following modules:
Orientation and Welcome
- Launch of 360 Degree Assessment Tool
- Live Webinar “Program Outline & Learning Journey” with Professor Gita Johar
- Optional: Accounting Basics, Financial Statements, and Key Ratios
For a complete program schedule, download the agenda.
“The leadership module was excellent. My favorite part was the 360 Assessment. I now know how I rank amongst my peers in this class and areas I need to improve on.”

Kwansah Ndemo
Pharmacist at Career Staff Rx, from Dallas“The best part for me were the lessons in how to use information effectively and the focus on teamwork and perspectives. I have applied some of the teachings at the workplace and have seen improvements in many aspects.”

Omar Fajardo
VP of Affiliate Relations at The Mix Group, from Miami“The leadership and social networking modules both completely changed my way to network and interact as a leader.”

Ghazi Chebil
Head of Cluster Northwest Africa at SIG Combibloc Obeikan, from TunisiaParticipant Profile
This program is designed for professionals who have recently taken on or aspire to move into a management role to help them develop leadership and decision-making capabilities. This includes existing managers and technical leaders who have been promoted to a role with management responsibility, executives who build and lead multi-functional teams, and entrepreneurs who need to expand their core business knowledge. Middle- and upper-level managers seeking a well-rounded, MBA-inspired management curriculum will also benefit from exposure to the latest marketing, finance, and leadership strategies taught by Columbia Business School faculty.
Faculty

Gita Johar
Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business in Marketing

Gita Johar
Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business in Marketing
Gita Johar is an influential scholar in the field of consumer psychology who has published several articles on consumer responses to marketing efforts. Her expertise in persuasion makes her uniquely qualified to lead a program on marketing and innovation, where the focus is on generating creative ideas as well as persuading consumers and colleagues to accept these ideas.
Johar has served as associate editor for such journals as the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Consumer Research, and the International Journal of Research in Marketing. She began a term as editor of the Journal of Consumer Research in July 2014. At Columbia, Gita teaches in the MBA, EMBA, and PhD programs and has authored cases on consumer adoption of new products and on marketing and advertising planning.
Johar is the Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and has been on the faculty since 1992. She received her PhD from the NYU Stern School of Business and her MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.

Oded Netzer
Arthur J. Samberg Professor of Business, Columbia Business School

Oded Netzer
Arthur J. Samberg Professor of Business, Columbia Business School
Professor Netzer's research at Columbia Business School centers on one of the major business challenges of the data-rich environment of the 21st century: developing quantitative methods that leverage data to gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior and guide firms' decisions.
He focuses primarily on building statistical and econometric models to measure consumer preferences and understand how customer choices change over time, and across contexts.

Adam Galinsky
Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics, Columbia Business School

Adam Galinsky
Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics, Columbia Business School
Adam Galinsky’s research and teaching focus on leadership, power, negotiations, decision making, diversity, and ethics. He is the co-author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling book, Friend & Foe, and he has published more than 200 scientific articles, chapters, and teaching cases in the fields of management and social psychology. His Ted talk, How to Speak Up for Yourself, is one of the most popular of all time with over 5.9 million views.
His research has received numerous national and international awards from the scientific community, including the most prestigious mid-career award in Social Psychology. He has received teaching awards at the Kellogg School of Management and Princeton University. Based on his research and teaching, Poets and Quants selected him as one of the World’s 50 Best B-School Professors in 2012.
Professor Galinsky has consulted with and conducted executive workshops for hundreds of clients across the globe, including Fortune 100 firms, non-profits, and local and national governments.

Daniel Wolfenzon
Co-Director, Family Business Program
Stefan H. Robock Professor of Finance and Economics

Daniel Wolfenzon
Co-Director, Family Business Program
Stefan H. Robock Professor of Finance and Economics
Daniel Wolfenzon received a Masters and a PhD in economics from Harvard University and holds a BS in economics and a BS in mechanical engineering from MIT. Professor Wolfenzon previously taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and NYU. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
His research interests are in corporate finance and organizational economics. He has studied control sharing in small firms, the effects of investor protection on ownership concentration, and the structure of business groups around the world.
His work has been published in top economic and finance journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Finance, and the Journal of Financial Economics.

The late Kathy Phillips
Reuben Mark Professor of Organizational Character

The late Kathy Phillips
Reuben Mark Professor of Organizational Character
Katherine W. Phillips joined the faculty at Columbia Business School as the Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics in Fall of 2011. Before joining us here, she was an associate professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and co-director and founder of Northwestern's Center on the Science of Diversity.
She had also been a Visiting Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Visiting Scholar at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences. Professor Phillips received her PhD in Organizational Behavior from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. Her Bachelors degree was in Psychology from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Her research addressed the main questions of what is the value of diversity and what are the barriers that prevent society, organizations, and especially work teams from capturing the knowledge, perspectives, and unique backgrounds of every member.
Meet Professor Johar in this video
Meet Professor Galinsky in this video
Hear from Professor Phillips in this video
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