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MPPL 600: Leading Across Differences: Styles, Worldviews, and Connections
This course explores the human dimension of leadership, focusing on how various personal leadership styles and perspectives shape not only the leader’s perspectives and actions, but also how they interact with those of other actors and individuals. The course will include a personal inventory of the individual’s worldview and leadership styles and provide exercises and opportunities to explore the advantages and limitations of that style.
It will build on a survey of the range of possible worldviews and styles to help students not only understand their unique dimensions, but also to facilitate their understanding of ways to connect with them. Students will also actively engage with how their personal worldviews shape the ways they connect and communicate with others. Leadership is a decidedly human experience and this course will explore how to effectively connect with others to engage them, enlist them, and mobilize them to common purposes and goals.
Along with these courses, you will also be required to complete the Capstone Policy Seminar course, along with 5 courses from one of our three stackable certificates.
MPPL 601: Prudence in Public Leadership: Case Studies in Leadership and Decision Making
This course examines how leaders make decisions. It surveys the landscape of decision-making models for leaders and positions the student in a laboratory to learn from some of the most effective and ineffective leaders in history. It teaches systems-based strategies to map alternative approaches to solving problems, explores the role that individual creativity plays in leadership, and demonstrates ways that collaboration with others can both hinder and facilitate good policy outcomes. While there is a historical focus on learning from the lessons of others, there is a forward-looking emphasis on building collaborative solutions to problems that require nuance and cooperation to address. The fundamentals of decision theory and systems analysis will be combined with tools for addressing conflict to help students develop solid heuristics for making decisions in complex and often divided policy environments.
MPPL 602: Collaboration, Conflict Resolution, and Negotiations in Public Policy
The theory and practice of alternative dispute resolution—negotiation, mediation, and arbitration—have burgeoned in the realm of United States domestic law. This salutary development has significantly reduced the time and cost of resolving many disputes, often mitigated their severity, and sometimes fostered genuine cooperation and reconciliation. Mediation and arbitration have a far more ambiguous record for resolving international disputes. This course will examine the role of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms in the realm of public policy from domestic issues to international politics.
MPPL 603: Using Data, Analytics, Information, and Budgets to Lead
For leaders to make prudent decisions, they must understand the full array of the information available to them. This course is designed to provide a sophisticated understanding of how to (1) manage today’s exploding volume of information; (2) intelligently comprehend, consume, and use statistical research and data; (3) use the various data analysis techniques to derive insight from data; (4) be able to quickly understand the how public finance information is communicated; and (5) grasp the value and limitations of various forms of quantitative and data-driven analysis. Students will be immersed in the practical questions that should guide how information should define and inform their thinking and decision processes. While not a statistics course, students will finish it with a healthy appreciation of the appropriate role that data analysis and analytics can and should play in their leadership portfolio.
MPPL 604: Navigating the Structure, Operation, and Ethos of American Institutions: A Tale of Two Perspectives
This course aims to provide a firm grasp of how major institutions operate in the American political process. These institutional settings exert powerful and often decisive effects on the efficacy and legitimacy of public policy. A firm grounding in this subject is, therefore, foundational for anyone engaged seriously and systematically in the arena of public policy—public or private. The course explores the perennial debate about the American Founding, a debate which increasingly divides the American political landscape, including the contending perspectives on the proper relationship between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches; between state, local, and federal governments; and between government at all levels and the individual. It will also delve into the rise of the Administrative State as it addresses the dynamics, legitimate functions, and sometimes dysfunctions of bureaucracy. Finally, the course will explore the evolving role that the media, religious organizations, corporate America, and other private institutions play in the dynamics and content of American politics.
