We all love to follow our favorite teams in the National Football League (NFL) and Major League Baseball (MLB). We spend our nights and weekends eagerly watching ESPN for the latest scores and trade gossip. But despite all the fun, professional sports leagues and teams are big business. This provides a great opportunity to use sports as a backdrop to examine disciplines like management, marketing, economics, and law.
Our presenter, Richard Brown, will examine NFL and MLB dynamics from the perspective of individual teams. He will discuss team decision-making and planning functions, competitive moves, organizational constraints, franchising elements, unionization, and industry structure. This will lay a foundation for the second session, which will cover franchising systems and logic. The concept of franchising lies at the intersection of corporate management and entrepreneurship. This class will view franchising both as a growth mechanism (i.e. should our company grow through franchising or chaining) and as an entry strategy (i.e. should I start a business as an independent company or as part of a franchise chain).
Learning Objectives:
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