Lee Dyer : Teaching
Courses:
HR 6600: HR Leadership: Views From the Top (Graduate Course)
This hands-on course offers students a unique opportunity to learn about strategic
business and human resource issues from the perspectives of senior human resource
executives. During the semester five Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) from
major corporations meet with the class for lively give-and-take sessions on subjects
of strategic and topical interest to their corporations. Before the CHRO's visits,
student teams prepare background papers on them, their companies, and the topics
they have chosen for the teams to work on. Students discuss these papers on a
timely basis to assure readiness to address the issues at hand when the CHROs
come to class. During the CHRO's visits, the teams host them and usually have
an opportunity to interact informally with them as well. After the visits, the
teams revise their background papers into white papers that reflect insights gained
from their research and class discussions. Subsequently, the five white papers
are assembled in a book that is shared with the CHROs and others.
HR6620: Agility and Complexity in Organizations (Undergraduate)
Increasingly, companies find themselves either by choice or chance competing
in tumultuous environments leading them to search for new ways of enhancing their
adaptability, nimbleness, resilience, or agility. Most focus on flexing their
basic bureaucracies and the first part of the course explores these efforts.
A few, though, are tentatively exploring the desirability/feasibility of using
tenets derived from complexity science to create new organizational forms that
are capable of driving continuous innovation in the marketplace with experiencing
major upheavals. The remaining two-thirds of the course, then, focuses on these
efforts. At this point, the pedagogy shifts from traditional to experiential.
Through self-organization, participants are provided opportunities not only to
experiment with new organizational forms, but also to feel first-hand what life
in them is like. By the end of the course, students should be prepared to become
knowledgeable forces for organizational transformation in the 21
st century.