Curriculum Overview

It is increasingly expected that business leaders be knowledgeable about the opportunities for data-driven decision-making and the inherent challenges and tradeoffs, and also proficient with manipulating and analyzing data themselves. Business Statistics and Analytics covers data analysis, sampling and estimation, hypothesis testing and multiple regression. You’ll learn basic statistical techniques and will acquire proficiency with the “art” of applying these techniques to practical managerial decision problems.

The purpose of this course is to increase your ability to analyze the strategy of corporations. You’ll focus on answering two main questions: (1) What allows certain firms to succeed – that is, earn positive economic profits – while other firms fail? (2) Why can certain firms sustain their economic profits over long periods of time, while for other firms these profits quickly disappear? In this case-based course, you will learn practical analytical techniques for analyzing these issues, evaluating alternate strategic plans and anticipating the consequences of specific decisions.

This course is designed to introduce you to financial management. Coursework approaches topics from the perspective of the discounted cash flow (DCF) principle, which provides a unifying framework to achieve value maximizing decisions in the context of finance. You’ll explore the role of financial markets in the economy and the role of financial managers in the firm, study corporate valuation, and learn about investment and financing policy.

Financial accounting is a crucial business tool. The primary goal is to become informed users of financial statements. By the end of the course, students should be able to analyze financial statements, footnotes, and other corporate disclosures, interpret articles from The Wall Street Journal and other business publications and understand analyst reports.

A secondary goal of this course is to ensure that students are comfortable with the mechanics of financial accounting. By the end of the course, students should be able to prepare financial statements reflecting a wide range of economic transactions. Understanding the impact of transactions on the financial statements is central to preparing business plans, forecasting financial performance, budgeting, and assessing the implications of proposed transactions on the financial statements.

The goal of this course is to introduce you to the concepts and techniques necessary to implement optimal investment decisions by firms and investors. The course studies the effect of time and uncertainty on financial decision making. Topics include discounting techniques, applications to personal finance, bonds, stocks and options valuation, optimal portfolios, project valuation and capital budgeting.

This course will cover core concepts and theories from psychology and organizational science, which form the knowledge base for leadership and management skills. The focus of the course is on surveying key skills for understanding yourself as a leader, improving individual and group decision-making, and motivating and influencing followers. This introductory course will help prepare you for continuous learning throughout the MBA program and your career.

This experiential course will reinforce best practices related to developing and delivering business presentations, including creating and organizing impactful presentations to accomplish specific rhetorical purposes, delivering information confidently with refined executive presence, and designing and integrating savvy visuals. Early in the course, you’ll deliver a baseline presentation, which will reveal your presentation strengths and opportunities.

This course is designed as an advanced level introduction to the basic principles and concepts in marketing. The goal is to expose you to these concepts as they are used in a wide variety of settings; including consumer goods firms, manufacturing and service industries, and small and large businesses. The course will give you an overview of marketing strategy issues, elements of a market situation analysis — company, customers, and competition, as well as the fundamental elements of the marketing mix — product, price, placement (distribution) and promotion. You will be challenged to apply the principles you learn in class to current and real-world marketing issues.

This course covers key concepts and toolkits related to marketing, managing and competing in technology-intensive markets.

Topics covered will include:

• Innovation in technology-intensive environments;
• Marketing-related AI applications in technology-intensive environments
• The economics of customer attention and decision-making in technology-intensive environments
• Customer experience management in technology-intensive environments
• Digital and social media marketing
• Understanding how start-ups work in technology-intensive environments
• Re-conceptualizing how products, services and solutions are designed in technology-intensive environments; managing pricing, digital channels and the omni-channel environment
• Competing well in technology-intensive environments, and
• Technology-infused market strategy design and implementation

Effective and efficient team-based problem solving is critical in the dynamic business environment. Leaders face complex challenges on an ongoing basis that require an objective evaluation in order to make a strategy, marketing, or operational decision that considers market opportunities, financial implications, risk and overall objectives. They often must do so in teams, distributing work and managing one another as they generate ideas and solve problems. This course will introduce students to problem solving skills and tools, as individuals and teams, and then provide an opportunity to apply those skills in a traditional case competition format. The final project will enable student teams to make fact based, creative and insightful recommendations that are presented in an executive style format.

This course develops the tools used in price forecasting and price setting, and applies these tools to a wide variety of topics along the way. Basic supply and demand methods are used to analyze the effects on prices of government policy and shocks to demand or output, both in the short and long run. This includes policies in markets with externalities and other market failures. After completing the course, you will be able to forecast prices of inputs and outputs of the production process, and will understand the basics of pricing.

Operations management is defined as the design, operation and improvement of the systems that create and deliver the firm’s primary products and services. This class provides an understanding of the operations management function and its relationship to other functional areas within the firm. In this class, you will develop frameworks to analyze the strengths and weakness of a firm’s operations and to develop viable alternatives in pursuing its goals and objectives. You will examine the tradeoffs that managers face in emphasizing one goal (such as high capacity utilization) as compared to another goal (such as minimum throughput time). Operations management will provide you with the tools, techniques, and strategies for making organizations work more effectively and efficiently, to make you a better manager.

This course focuses on exploring how managers of complex organizations effectively exploit information to achieve organizational objectives, and covers all types of organizations, including profit seeking companies, non-profits and public sector entities. The premise of the course is that the achievement of organizational objectives depends on both making good decisions and aligning managers and employees with the organization’s objectives. You’ll develop a sophisticated understanding of the powerful role of strategic cost analysis and performance measurement in supporting decision-making, performance management and incentive alignment in a timely, efficient and effective manner.

This course focuses on internal operations and cost analysis as opposed to the evaluation of external financial statements. Its target audience includes students intending to become management consultants, entrepreneurs, managers (e.g., CEOs, CFOs, product managers), and anyone with an interest in how firms make decisions about products and services. Topics covered include overhead allocation, activity-based costing, capacity costs, transfer pricing, performance evaluation, and internal controls, and their specific application in the manufacturing and services sectors.

Leading ethically is highly beneficial to employees and organizations. This course focuses on identifying and building leadership skills that can enable students to match their leadership approach to specific organizational demands focused on leading ethical and productive outcomes.

Skill development will occur by reviewing course material on theoretical principles of ethics, with emphasis on experiential learning through cases, scenarios, and activities geared to engage students in recognizing ethical aspects and opportunities in business situations, diagnosing problems associated with ethics, and developing action plans to best fulfill ethics priorities within organizations. The course takes an interdisciplinary, skills-based approach to understanding ethics, with the goal of helping you to master skills to become an ethical leader.

This course aims to prepare future executives for the challenges of resisting corporate corruption in a number of ways.  First, it seeks to sensitize you to the warning signs that a firm’s financial control culture is weak. Inadequate financial control typically is symptomatic of a potential for scandal.  Second, it aims to illustrate how younger employees come to be placed in vulnerable circumstances, and how inexperience renders them both more exposed and more expendable.  Most importantly, it seeks to equip you with a tool kit of tactical options for resisting pressures to behave unethically. By the end of the course, students should be well prepared to see trouble coming and identify more options for handling it than futile struggle, acquiesce or resign.

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) challenges have become major strategic issues for companies around the globe, where managers increasingly struggle to integrate sustainability into organizational strategy formulation and implementation. In this course, you will evaluate 1) the various drivers behind sustainability (from institutional, such as social movements and global pressures, to strategic reasons, such as cost savings, firm differentiation and competitive advantages); 2) how companies respond to various sustainability issues; and 3) when firms maximize social, environmental and economic value from engagement in solving sustainability issues. This course will help you develop critical thinking skills that are useful for corporate sustainability and leadership in the 21st century, analyze and identify sustainability challenges and opportunities, and become an effective social change agent.