Command-line equivalent of “start in” field on windows shortcuts

Question

I'm in Windows 7. I have an executable. I put it somewhere. I put this location in my path. Now I can start it from anywhere using cmd. I have a different location where I work containing files the .exe will process. I shift right-click to open cmd in the work location. I can run the exe, but the exe starts in its own location and can't find the files. If I were to create a windows shortcut to it, I would get a "start in" field, which would work. But I do this a lot from many different locations and I don't want to create a shortcut in each location. How do I do this on the command line without creating a shortcut? It would be great if I could just run something like

progam /startin .

What is the actual syntax?

Answer 1

@echo off
setlocal
pushd "c:\where\you\want\to\start"
programname
popd

This is the basic structure.