Mastercard announces the launch of “Master your Own Business” Executive Education Program for women entrepreneurs, in collaboration with Alba Graduate Business School.

The Program aims to equip women across different seniority levels, functions, and industries, with cutting edge knowledge, skills and competencies, that will drive them to boost their mindset and design their own future, while they also establish and boost a dynamic learning network through which they will share their insights, challenges and opportunities for growth. The "Master your Own Business" refers to middle and senior-level women professionals and entrepreneurs who aspire to gain a deeper understanding of the business environment and establish themselves as professionals with fruitful businesses.

The dedicated Executive Education Program combines specialized knowledge and experience with high-end learning across the following pillars: Leadership & Self-Leadership, Digitalization and Entrepreneurship.

The program will have online learning mode and participants will be granted with an Executive Certificate from Alba.

Positive Mindset and Resilience with Dr. Anastasios Stalikas

Positivity affects our brain, mind, behaviors, learning and performance. The concepts and ideas of Positive Psychology are easily applied, transferred and incorporated in most arenas of human functioning. Research findings indicate that positivity is causally related to physical and psychological health, work, school and athletic performance, psychological resilience and learning, innovation, creativity and leadership. Thus, it has become quintessential for managers to be aware of the benefits derived from Positive Psychology in relation to work environment performance, job satisfaction, team building, and to implement positive psychological strategies for better performance and higher achievement. The session outlines the main concepts, models and application of Positive Psychology in the work environment.
The main axes are:

• Introduction to positive psychology: History, milestones, concepts
• The beneficial role of Positive Emotions: The function, the benefits and the value of positive emotions 
• Positivity, Resilience, Optimism, Hope & Well-being 
• Positive Leadership, authenticity & transformation 
• Promoting Healthy Organizations: Values, meaning & incorporation of positive emotions in Organizations

Conflict Management, Dr Elena Koltsaki

Conflicts within the corporate environment reduce productivity while consuming a great deal of managerial time, only to get temporary results. Cooperation, understanding and quick and effective mechanisms for conflict management and resolution are vital to avoid both personal and economic costs and boost productivity. This session focuses on the management of conflict in the workplace and aims to assist helps individuals, companies and larger organizations not only handle but also prevent conflicts in the working environment, with colleagues, customers and business partners.

Negotiations Skills, Dr Elena Koltsaki

The Negotiations Seminar, aims at empowering participants with the tools, the competencies, the techniques and the mindset that will allow them to achieve optimum results in the negotiations contexts and challenges that they face, and improve their negotiations results, both in their personal and in their professional lives. The content provides a blend of cutting edge theory, practical knowledge, role plays and interactive exercises that evolve in a collaborative context that boosts self-awareness, feedback and reflection and assists participants to think about negotiation preparation and strategy in an organized way.

Narrative Intelligence Workshop, with Ms Polyna Roussou

This workshop aims at building narrative intelligence. The focus will be at introducing the power of stories and narrative as a means of understanding, constructing, and re-constructing our identity, self and experience in the workplace context and other contexts we occupy. Additionally, this module will also shortly introduce the value of a widely neglected element of the workplace, namely the ‘bodily’ experience. We will learn how body states influence behaviors, narratives and finally workplace culture.
Key Take Aways:

• Ability to understand the narrative practices of our workplace culture and what these mean in terms of workplace identity. Skills for reshaping, reconstructing, and introducing new narratives in the service of change in workplace culture and personal identities.
• Skills for diagnosing the levels of stress in the workplace and aiding the creation of safe, ‘embodied’ workplace environments. Learning and working with the links between ‘story’ and ‘body states.’

Management in the Digital Era, with Dr Nikos Mylonopoulos

The seminar on Management in the Digital Era clarifies the specific ways in which innovation in digital technologies changes the rules of the game in business, market competition, the economy, and the society. Currently we experience a transitional period during which a new paradigm, driven by digital and postdigital technologies, is already dominating the reality around us. This seminar has implications for strategic decision making in business (including, for example, technology investments, new revenue models, platform and ecosystem co-opetition, workforce and talent management, and others) as well as personal and professional learning and development.
This seminar blends the emerging trends in digital technologies, their economic properties, the consequent implications for market competition and platform business models, and concludes with the demands that such changes impose on leadership, management, organizational culture and structure, as well as the requisite skills.
Specifically, the following topics will be covered.

1. Technology trends
2. Drivers of change
3. The Economics of Digital
4. Platforms and Ecosystems
5. Digital Disruption
6. Digital Transformation
7. Agile Management

Design Thinking, with Dr Nikos Mylonopoulos

Design thinking is a creative approach to problem-solving aiming to break established biases and stereotypes and to seek solutions that meet the deeper needs and aspirations of people. This is why the most important defining characteristic of design thinking is that it is human-centered. Design thinking begins with deep empathy and understanding of the needs and motivations of people. Human-centered design is all about starting with people and building deep empathy; generating lots of possible ideas; building and testing prototypes with the people we are designing for; and eventually putting new solutions out into the world to improve work and life. Design thinking is collaborative. Several great minds are always stronger when solving a challenge than just one. Design thinking benefits greatly from the views of multiple perspectives. This session, aims to introduce participants to the method of design thinking and to the application and practice of the main stages of the design thinking process (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test) in order to tackle complex problems, to collaboratively come up with decisions and to develop decision making effectiveness.

Identifying Business Opportunities , with Mr Alexis Komselis

How can entrepreneurs identify opportunities for growth, expansion and/or diversification? Looking for ways to grow a business or overcome problems is an integral part of entrepreneurial strategy. In this workshop participants will familiarize themselves with tools and processes to both identify opportunities and understand their potential.

Value Chain: Turning ideas into Business, with Mr Alexis Komselis

This workshop focuses on turning ideas into functional business structures. Based on the business' value proposition and business model we identify core and supportive activities. Understanding the business' value chain helps entrepreneurs to identify costs and cost structures, create sustainable value creation systems and mitigate risk.

Τhe Program is addressed to women entrepreneurs, university graduates, ages 22 – 42, that aspire to build or grow their business.

Applicants may range across levels of experience or industry sectors.

The application process will be followed by a selection process in order to decide on the group of 20 women who will join the program.

Selection criteria will focus on the motivation of the participants to engage in continuous learning, to add value to the rest of the team, to become part of a vibrant learning network, as well as the intention to boost their self – awareness and work towards their personal and professional growth, as the above are expressed in their application form. For this reason, we encourage the applicants to share their  challenges , goals aspirations in the dedicated section of the application.

To request more information or to receive the application form, please fill out the form below.