Teaching: Columbia Business School Courses 

At Columbia Business School, Modupe teaches full-time and Executive MBAs, executives and managers in the School’s Executive Education Program, and Ph.D. students. Below are brief descriptions of courses and modules she has taught in recent years:


MBA Students

B6500: Lead: People, Teams, Organizations

The goal of this course is to enhance MBA students’ skills for leading people, teams, and organizations. The course is designed as the first step on students’ academic and professional journey at Columbia Business School. Our goal is to help students build their leadership toolkit and facilitate their ability to take charge of their own careers. The twin themes of the course are: (1) developing, managing, and leading oneself and others around you and (2) cultivating a thriving career for oneself.

B7583: Executive Ethics (Session on Stereotyping and Discrimination in Organizations)

Despite laws that protect the rights of employees, discrimination persists in 21st century organizations. This session examines individual, group, and organizational-level factors that can influence discrimination in the workplace. Specifically, the session explores how social categories can perpetuate the use of stereotypes and examine how these stereotypes can manifest in the form of prejudice and discrimination at critical junctures in an individual’s career. We also explore strategies individuals, groups, and organizations can use to combat workplace discrimination.

B8772-001: Global Immersion: Lessons from Rwanda on Conflict, Leadership, Change, and Business Opportunities

A growing number of African countries have achieved steady, high growth rates during the last few decades. This Global Immersion Program asks how companies and investors can enter and operate efficiently in African countries, what challenges characterize the private sector in Africa, and what strategies can firms and organizations adopt to overcome them? Armed with frameworks and analytical tools from management and economics, the class will travel to Rwanda to meet with executives and companies to understand the leadership practices, processes, and structures that have led to the country’s remarkable recovery, reconciliation, current peace, and economic growth.


Ph.D. Students

B9517: (Ph.D.) Advanced Micro Seminar in Social Interactions in Groups and Organizations

How do we make sense of other people and of ourselves in organizations? Building on a long tradition of research and theory in social psychology, and invigorated by an infusion of new ideas and methods emerging from cognitive psychology, social cognition researchers have shed new light on many classic social psychological questions and have extended these ideas in applied (e.g., organizational) contexts. The seminar will have both a practical and theoretical focus. Practically, it will focus on how to identify and formulate questions that are both provocative and tractable, how to decide on appropriate research designs and strategies, how to write an effective research article, and how to navigate the publication process. Theoretically, it will provide a more complete understanding of our knowledge of how people think about individuals and groups in organizations.


Executive Education Teaching

Rethinking Stress: Harnessing the Benefits of Stress to Enhance Performance

As individuals ascend to more powerful positions in their organizations, they face ever-increasing demands on their time. These demands can be stressful and have the potential to negatively impact performance, health, and well-being. This session offers tools to help employees at all levels of the organization learn from and adapt to stress in ways that can help increase their productivity, enhance their creativity, and improve health outcomes. This session provides participants with essential information, based on leading academic research, on how to manage stress and harness the beneficial effects of stress to help them further thrive in their organizations.

Women in Leadership

Over the past decades, organizations have devoted significant effort to increasing the gender diversity of their workforces. The reasons for these efforts are manifold. Gender diversity has been found to improve work group performance by facilitating creative problem solving and novel insights. Having a more gender diverse workforce is presumed to increase an organization’s access to key markets and constituencies. Further, greater gender diversity is thought to be evidence of fair treatment of employees, redressing unethical practices that have historically hindered the progression of underrepresented groups in the workforce. Despite these benefits of diversity, women remain underrepresented across organizational levels and on corporate boards. This session is aimed at helping women navigate the complexities of organizational life and equipping them to progress to leadership roles with greater influence.

Developing Black Leaders in Financial Services

Organizations have increasingly recognized the importance of diversity in their workforce, especially at senior levels, in order to drive creativity, innovation, and growth. At Columbia Business School Executive Education, our Developing Black Leaders in Financial Services program addresses an ongoing challenge in the financial services field: the development, promotion, and retention of black financial services professionals. Based on feedback from industry leaders, the program takes place in two modules over two years and will result in the participant’s completion of a truly unique and rigorous learning experience designed to help fill the gap in the professional development market.