Welcome
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hi there, my name
is Bharat Anand.
I am a faculty member at
Harvard Business School.
And I am very pleased
to welcome you
to the Harvard Business
School course on Economics
for Managers.
You're going to learn not only
about markets and business
decisions, but the
power of economics
as a way of thinking that's
useful in many of these arenas.
We're not going to introduce you
to curves, models, or graphs.
All right, maybe
a few really cool
graphs, but we're
going to introduce you
to economic principles that
are important for managers
to understand.
When we think about
demand and how
we want to learn more
about potential demand,
it really spans the
entire product lifecycle
, from the early days
of potential product
all the way to frankly
planning the next quarter's
worth of production
and how we communicate
our potential financial
performance to Wall Street.
I view research as a tool--
quantitative's a tools,
qualitative's a tool,
conjoined is a tool.
What's the best tool to
serve the ultimate objective?
Our real intent is to have
you see and appreciate
the range of business settings
where simple economic thinking
can take you a very long way.
That's the great
game of business
is trying to understand how
those fundamental concepts
which are indeed true impact
the decisions we make.
What we really want to do
is to understand the world.
The world is messy and complex.
Certainly, the price system
is extremely complex.
One of the things
we also want to do
is have you see and appreciate
where and how companies get it
, right, where they use economic
logic and powerful ways,
and where they can sometimes
fall into decision making
traps.
I've been involved now
in a couple of instances
where we've done the
relative cost analysis.
You'll learn so much
about what drives costs.
Cost is not only
important to secure
future profits and cash flow.
It is a mindset that
helps you to manage
disruptive transformation
in companies and industries.
As you think about
going out in the world
and using these tools
of experimentation,
the first thing to think
is to think of yourself
as an experimenter.
First to change your mindset of
what it means to actually look
for data from the world that
helps to know whether something
works or doesn't work.
This, in other
words, is a course
that we at Harvard
Business School
, would want every
one of our students
to master before they
enter our MBA program.
And that we hope employers
would relish having
all the new employees take.
It's a course that
we hope will give you
much more confidence
and a lot more
fun in applying some
deep economic principles
to fascinating problems in
business and management.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hi there, my name
is Bharat Anand.
I am a faculty member at
Harvard Business School.
And I am very pleased
to welcome you
to the Harvard Business
School course on Economics
for Managers.
You're going to learn not only
about markets and business
decisions, but the
power of economics
as a way of thinking that's
useful in many of these arenas.
We're not going to introduce you
to curves, models, or graphs.
All right, maybe
a few really cool
graphs, but we're
going to introduce you
to economic principles that
are important for managers
to understand.
When we think about
demand and how
we want to learn more
about potential demand,
it really spans the
entire product lifecycle
, from the early days
of potential product
all the way to frankly
planning the next quarter's
worth of production
and how we communicate
our potential financial
performance to Wall Street.
I view research as a tool--
quantitative's a tools,
qualitative's a tool,
conjoined is a tool.
What's the best tool to
serve the ultimate objective?
Our real intent is to have
you see and appreciate
the range of business settings
where simple economic thinking
can take you a very long way.
That's the great
game of business
is trying to understand how
those fundamental concepts
which are indeed true impact
the decisions we make.
What we really want to do
is to understand the world.
The world is messy and complex.
Certainly, the price system
is extremely complex.
One of the things
we also want to do
is have you see and appreciate
where and how companies get it
, right, where they use economic
logic and powerful ways,
and where they can sometimes
fall into decision making
traps.
I've been involved now
in a couple of instances
where we've done the
relative cost analysis.
You'll learn so much
about what drives costs.
Cost is not only
important to secure
future profits and cash flow.
It is a mindset that
helps you to manage
disruptive transformation
in companies and industries.
As you think about
going out in the world
and using these tools
of experimentation,
the first thing to think
is to think of yourself
as an experimenter.
First to change your mindset of
what it means to actually look
for data from the world that
helps to know whether something
works or doesn't work.
This, in other
words, is a course
that we at Harvard
Business School
, would want every
one of our students
to master before they
enter our MBA program.
And that we hope employers
would relish having
all the new employees take.
It's a course that
we hope will give you
much more confidence
and a lot more
fun in applying some
deep economic principles
to fascinating problems in
business and management.
