Online courses directory (51)

Jeff Hawkins is the co-founder of Palm and Handspring and is the architect of many computing products such as the PalmPilot and the Treo smartphone. In this course he will take you on a journey through his career, how he became an entrepreneur and the importance of believing in your product. He teaches valuable lessons about the importance of experience, following your passions and how to keep a work/life balance. He discusses how to design successful products, the role of market research and the need to continuously test products. In terms of the company workplace, he talks about how a good business culture and a strong human resources policy are vital. You will also learn about the importance and inevitability of portable technology. This course will be of great interest to business professionals who will learn much from the experience, knowledge and wisdom Jeff Hawkins has gained over his career. It will also be of interest to business students setting out on their careers, in particular those who would like to become technology entrepreneurs.<br />

Marissa Mayer has led product management efforts at Google as Google's Vice President of Search Products &amp; User Experience products. Her responsibilities cover such products as Google Search, Gmail, Google Chrome and Google Labs. She believes that ideas for new products can come from every employee and department within an organisation, and also from end users of the product or service. In this free online course, Marissa explains how Google’s open culture and flat management of the organisation encourages creativity and brilliant ideas. She explains how Google sets asides 20 per cent of each employee’s time for creative projects and how this has proved to be a massive success. You will learn that Google do not make their product decisions on company politics but on data and facts. She explains how their focus on users and the software tools that keep users returning to Google has been at the centre of their success. This course will be of great interest to business and IT professionals who want to learn more about Google's success and business practices that created this success.<br />

William Sahlman is one of the world’s leading authorities on entrepreneurship. As a professor at Harvard Business School, his research focuses on investment and financing decisions made in entrepreneurial ventures at all stages of their development. In this free online course, Professor Sahlman explains why the best money comes from customers not venture capitalists. He describes the key elements of an entrepreneurial venture using the example of John Osher who developed the spin toothbrush. You will learn how to achieve the greatest value by changing the relationship of these elements to one another. He identifies important factors to improve entrepreneurial success. He focuses on what drives entrepreneurs, the importance of recognising opportunity and dealing with change. He discusses how your organisation depends on great people and what to look for when hiring. This course will be of great interest to business professionals and students looking for greater knowledge and understanding of the key elements of entrepreneurial success.<br />

Guy Kawasaki is best known as “chief evangelist” of Apple. In this free online course he gives important lessons about entrepreneurship. He explains why he thinks that the most successful companies will be those that aim to create a positive change in society. He explains how to make meaning in your company so that you can make a difference. You will learn about mantras, getting going, defining a business model and creating a niche for your company. He also recommends that you hire “infected” people, people who love the product or service. You will also learn about lowering barriers to adoption, approaching sales and how to become a “mensch”. He discusses how to find evangelists and soul mates and what is the career path to becoming an entrepreneur or venture capitalist. This course will be of great interest to all business professionals or budding entrepreneurs who are interested in starting up a business and would like to hear advice and guidance from someone who has already done it successfully but who has also been very close to extraordinary achievement in the area of the growth of high technology businesses.<br />

Jerry Kaplan is widely known in the computer industry as a serial entrepreneur, executive, technical innovator and author. In this free online course he explains what the best qualities of serial entrepreneurs are and the five biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make. He discusses the five critical skills that entrepreneurs need: leadership, communication, decision-making, being a team player and the ability to telescope. He explains the vital importance of sales skills and recruiting people to sell for you. This course will show you how the timing of an idea is very important and why it is very difficult to call. Kaplan shares his advice on the types of risks that companies face when they start off and how the trick is to get the risk out as soon as possible. He discusses the best time to start a business, why he admires and respects business leaders such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and how to establish culture and values in a company early on. He also talks about how roles change within a company when there is a transition away from R&amp;D. This course will be of great interest to business professionals, entrepreneurs, business students and anyone with a general interest in gaining a better knowledge and understanding of the critical skills needed by entrepreneurs to create successful businesses.<br />

Tom Kelley is the highly respected general manager of IDEO, a firm that helps its clients create innovative products, services and environments. He is also the author of best-selling books on creativity. <br /><br />In ALISON's free online course about achieving personal success, Kelley starts by explaining how achieving personal success depends on implementing good, healthy mental habits. The course explains how you should treat life as an experiment, how you should be willing to fail and learn from your mistakes. Kelley advises that you should have confidence in what you know well, but realize that you have a lot more to learn and that you must keep yourself learning at all times. You will also learn about using your whole brain and how you should make the most of opportunities to use the right side of the brain. <br /><br />This course will appeal to all working professionals in businesses and organizations, and students who want to gain greater knowledge and understanding about achieving personal success.<br />

In the free online course, John Doerr talks about how to succeed as a venture capitalist. John is a legend in venture investing having played a key role in the emergence and development of some of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies. He is a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield &amp; Byers, joining them in 1980, and has sponsored a series of investments including Compaq, Cypress, Intuit, Macromedia, Netscape, Lotus, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, S3, Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com, and Symantec. In this course he talks about what distinguishes successful companies from others. He views entrepreneurs as missionaries and gives valuable advice on assembling a great team of people. He discusses important new disruptive technologies and the impact of social entrepreneurship. He gives valuable career advice and predicts what the future of technology and venture capital will look like. You will learn what it takes to become a great venture capitalist and also how to treat negotiations when pursuing initial venture capital funding. This course will be of great interest to entrepreneurs and business professionals who would like to find out how venture capitalists work and what it takes to persuade them to financially back your company or business idea.<br />

Steve Blank is a serial entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience in high technology companies and management. He is also a Consulting Professor at Stanford in the Graduate School of Engineering. In this free online course he goes through a checklist of questions and answers that will be helpful to any new business leader. He offers insights and case studies from industry and new technology companies. He focuses on important areas for business start-ups including market opportunity, market regulations and distribution, competitors and complimentors, and technology breakthroughs. You will learn why sometimes being the first and only company in a particular market can actually be a disadvantage. He discusses the difference between vertical markets and horizontal markets, and you will also learn why market and technical risks are of great importance for an entrepreneurial venture. This course will be of interest to business people, entrepreneurs and anyone who would like to hear key insights and knowledge gained by a very successful entrepreneur with years of experience in business start-ups and management.<br />

Vinod Khosla grew up dreaming of being an entrepreneur and in 2004, he formed Khosla Ventures which offers start-up assistance, strategic advice and financial backing to entrepreneurs. The firm helps entrepreneurs extend the potential of their ideas in both traditional areas like the Internet, computing, mobile, and silicon technology, and also supports clean technology areas such as bio-refineries for energy and bio-plastics, solar, battery and other environmentally friendly technologies. In this free online course he explains how his ambition in life from a young age was to be an entrepreneur but how he had to learn from failure early on in his career. He explains his business motto of why you should think big and act small. He talks about taking risks and why companies are more successful when they have a mission to change the world. You will learn what areas of investment interest and excite him and why he considers any big problem to be an opportunity. He discusses his views on technology driven entrepreneurship and why social entrepreneurship is so important. In terms of teamwork, he explains how to build strong teams and why great CEOs must build great teams. This course will be of great interest to entrepreneurs, business professionals and anyone who wants to learn from the experience and wisdom of a very successful business person.<br />

Personal financial debt can be a source of great anxiety and worry for many people, and it can be difficult to know where to start when you want to take control of your financial debts. This free online course helps you get started on the road to reducing your personal financial debts and becoming debt free. The course offers you a clear way of understanding exactly how much money you owe and to whom by setting up a debt spreadsheet, how to contact credit card companies to request a break on interest rates, how to prioritise which debt to pay off first, what strategy you should use to pay off debts based on minimum monthly payments or highest interest rates charged, and how to implement an emergency debt elimination plan if needed. This course will be of great interest to personal finance professionals who work with people who find themselves in financial difficulty and to anyone who wants clear guidance on how to reduce their personal financial debts and become debt free.<br />

Janice Fraser is CEO and co-founder of Adaptive Path, an experience design consultancy firm based in San Francisco, California and Austin, Texas. Janice is an experienced entrepreneur and in this free online course she talks in detail about how important the culture of a business is for the success of that business. She emphasises that a productive culture is one where managers create meaning for their employees. By promoting a business culture that employees can buy into they will become more motivated and work more passionately to make the business a success. Janice believes that alignment is the key factor underlying everything we do. In a business alignment means that employees are doing fulfilling work which they excel at. This course will be of great interest to all business professionals and managers who would like to gain advice and guidance about creating a successful business culture which has meaning for all employees.<br />

eBay is now a household name as during the past decade it has become the world’s leading online marketplace. eBay allows anyone sit in their living room and buy and sell for their pleasure or as a business. In this free online course we get an insight into the workings of how eBay was born as a company, how they managed the creative processes as well as their marketing strategies. Along with eBay there is also a discussion about PayPal, created by the team at eBay to function as their payment scheme for customers but which is now the world’s leading online payments company. The course also reviews their acquisitions projects, the successes and failures experienced by the company, potential growth sectors and the future of eBay and PayPal. This course will be of great interest to all business and marketing professionals, and budding entrepreneurs who would like learn how a world-class company like eBay grew and prospered.<br />

Developing a successful business model is something that takes skill and considerable business acumen and cannot be achieved overnight. Entrepreneurs have to take into account resources, onsite expertise, and importantly, drive and diligence of both management and employees. In this free online business course, you will get an insight into the business model used in SlideShare, a digital media company based in Silicon Valley. Jonathan Boutelle and Rashmi Sinha from SlideShare discuss the learning curve that was needed in order for them to implement their strategies and achieve their goals so that their business model became a success. They also discuss how they managed the business growth process as well as the execution of their tasks. You will learn from these successful entrepreneurs about their experiences, what they learned about creating their business model, and how they dealt with the steep learning curve presented to them. This course will be of great interest to business professionals and budding entrepreneurs looking for advice and guidance on the strategies and goals needed to create a successful business.<br />

When most people think about currency exchange, we are usually thinking about buying foreign currency to bring with us on vacation. However, currency exchange involves much more such as treasuries, bonds, imports and exports, trade imbalances, and the borrowing costs of a country. This free online course about currency exchange gives us a key insight into the financing behind a country's growth and development, and answers questions such as how is the money raised to build a country's infrastructure. The course discusses how currency is valued, devalued, and how countries trade and lend money to each other. It also discusses the knock-on effects of lack of demand for treasury bonds to a country and the costs thereafter. This course will be of great interest to business and finance professionals who would like to learn more about currency exchange mechanisms, and to the non-finance professional person wishing to know more about what role currency exchange practices play in the financial system.<br />

The ability to negotiate effectively is an art form which many of us are not confident in doing. Formal negotiations are however, a vital part of communication across various sectors from business to politics. In this free online course, Stan Christensen, co-founder of Arbor Advisors, discusses the art of negotiation and the skills and techniques required to be persuasive in a positive manner. You will also learn why the skill of really listening is of vital importance when meeting goals at the negotiation table and he explains the lessons he learned during his time as a professional mediator. This free negotiating course will be of interest to all professionals in many varied sectors such as business, entrepreneurship, human resources and management who are looking for guidance on the art and practise of successful negotiation.<br />

AgraQuest is a company which developed a groundbreaking bio-pesticide that changed the way food is cultivated using pesticides and was a revolution in growing safer food for consumers. In this free online course Pam Marrone, founder of AgraQuest, discusses about how she guided AgraQuest to be today’s leader in bio-pesticides. With her savvy business sense, we learn how Pam pioneered a huge turnaround in marketing the AgraQuest product to capture a niche in the pesticide market. We learn the key factors which brought about the formation of AgraQuest and what changes were made in the pesticide market to convince farmers that they needed to make the change to bio-pesticides manufactured by AgraQuest. It also highlights the stumbling blocks encountered by Pam and her team when bringing AgraQuest products to the market and the lessons they learned from this process. This free course will be of interest to entrepreneurs and business professionals who would like to learn how a company can grow and become successful by creating a need for their product or service, and by developing a marketing plan that convinces consumers to make the change to their product or service. <br />

Building an effective online presence is critical for growing your business as it gives your company access to thousands or millions of local, national or international customers who are searching, interacting, sharing and shopping online. In this course you will learn why you must get your business up and running on the Web using e-commerce sites, review sites and social networks. You will also learn that having a Website which is easy to navigate, is informative, and has a good domain name, the right design template and memorable Web copy will help your business stand out from the competition. The course discusses why it is important to have a presence on the mobile Web and how to attract your target audience using tools like Google AdWords. This course will be of great interest to all business owners who are thinking of setting up a Website for their business but are uncertain of how to go about doing it. It will also be beneficial to any company or organisation that wants their existing Website to be more effective at attracting potential customers.<br />

Investment and tax principles are very important topics in finance and professionals who act as investment and taxation advisors must have a thorough knowledge and understanding of these areas. In this free online financial course you will learn more about risk-and-return concepts, capital markets and explore various aspects of taxation such as understanding what tax deductions are and how to calculate the upper and lower bounds on forward settlement prices. This course will be of great interest to financial and business professionals who would like a greater understanding of investment and taxation practices and procedures, and to learners who would like to learn more about these fundamental areas of finance.

Aggregate supply and demand are key concepts in macroeconomics as they help economists interpret events in the past to help predict the future. The aggregate supply curve model demonstrates the relationship between the overall price level of a country and the quantity of goods and services produced by the suppliers of that country, whereas the aggregate demand curve model demonstrates the quantity of goods and services produced domestically that consumers, businesses, the government and foreigners are willing to purchase during a particular period of time. This free online economics course first introduces the learner to the business cycle to show that the local economy is constantly expanding and contracting in response to changes in the global economy, technology and national and international politics. The course then introduces the concept of aggregate demand, how it shifts and how it is modelled. You will also learn about aggregate supply, and how changes in supply can be slower than changes in demand. This free online economics course will be of great interest to professionals in the areas of economics, finance, and business who would like to learn more about modelling aggregate supply and demand. It will also appeal to all learners interested in business, economics or political studies who would like to understand why the health of the economy is cyclical and why one event can have a significant effect on an economy.<br />

In this free online accounting course you will be introduced to accounting and its use in making business decisions. You will learn how to identify and describe the three basic forms of business organizations, and also distinguish among the three types of activities performed by business organizations. The course then describes the content and purposes of the income statement, statement of retained earnings, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows. You will learn about the basic accounting equation and describe its relationship to the balance sheet. The course then shows you how to prepare an income statement, a statement of retained earnings, and a balance sheet, and also how to analyse and use the financial results—the equity ratio. This free online accounting course will be of great interest to entrepreneurs and business professionals who would like to get a thorough introduction to accounting principles, and to any learner who is interested in accounting as a future career.<br />