LAW 716 - Power & Influence

This is a course about learning to use power and influence as effective tools for both understanding your surroundings and achieving your goals. It is a course about getting things done in the real world, where politics and personalities can often seem to hinder rather than help you. It is a course for those of you who want to make things happen, despite the obstacles that might stand in your way. Consequently, it is a course about you. Course Objectives: This course presents conceptual models, tactical approaches and self-assessment tools to help you understand political dynamics as they unfold around you and develop your influence style. By focusing on specific expressions of power and influence this course gives you the opportunity to observe their effective and ineffective uses in different contexts and stages of a person’s career. The subject matter will introduce different ethical questions. This course should challenge you to define what will constitute the ethical exercise of power and influence in your life. In this course we will rely on a mix of case studies, exercises, self-assessment tools and readings. Your grade will be based 50% on class participation and 50% on the final paper.