This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Nobody is trained to run a whole organisation. You are trained in one function, you do it well, and then you are handed everything else on the assumption that it will come to you.

Some of it does. The rest shows up as a budget you cannot interrogate and a strategy document nobody reads twice.

What general management actually demands

You can read a profit and loss statement and still not know whether the business model works. You approve a budget without being able to say what decision it supports. The strategy offsite produces a document that is quietly abandoned by March, because nobody assigned owners or resources to it. The processes that carried fifty people buckle at two hundred, and the fix is more meetings. Meanwhile the strongest person on your team is being interviewed elsewhere and you will hear about it when the resignation arrives.

None of that is a talent problem. It is five separate disciplines that nobody taught you together.

Strategy and finance

Forty-eight lessons. Ten on the top job itself: the role, running an executive strategy session, culture, product portfolio, growth engines, the financial toolkit, crisis decisions, transformation, technology, and the division of labour with operations.

Then six on strategic planning as a process rather than an event — preparing the team, auditing where you honestly stand, running the two-day offsite, publishing the plan, and the part that usually fails: KPIs, owners, resources and milestones.

Then twelve on business finance. The operating model, business modelling, how models evolve from start-up to corporation, values expressed as financial targets, process black holes, goal-setting people believe, the strategy pyramid, budgeting that supports decisions, KPIs across four dimensions, Lean Six Sigma, scaling, and what comes after efficiency.

Operations and people

Then eight on operations: why a company needs the function past fifty people, mapping processes and knowing where not to formalise, input and outcome metrics with owners attached, bottlenecks and waste, operating rhythms, managing chaos during growth, the tooling, and the career path.

And twelve on managing people: hiring, developing, one-to-ones, choosing a deputy, motivation, pay, bonuses, retention and counter-offers, development strategy, launching OKR cleanly, team conflict, and control that does not demotivate.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

One question before you start

Take last year's strategic plan and check how many of its commitments have a named owner and a budget line. In most organisations it is under half, and that number predicts the year better than the plan does. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.