Core Courses
Focusing Your Energies
The core courses, which make up about 60 percent of the curriculum, are all taken in the first three terms and are deliberately designed to build upon one another. During the final two terms, challenging electives and independent study build on the solid core of rigorous general management courses. Your professors update elective courses regularly to reflect the newest ideas, trends and thinking, and they combine innovative theory and practical experience to deliver a dynamic business education.
Throughout the curriculum, faculty members use a variety of teaching methods. Case studies, seminars, simulations, guest speakers and group projects all facilitate the learning process. Classroom learning is enhanced by numerous opportunities to apply the lessons to real-world situations.
Core Courses
Because Corporate Finance is an introductory finance course and is required of all MBA students, it is designed to cover those areas of finance that are important to all managers, whether they specialize in finance or not. At the end of this course you will be able to value a firm. In order to reach this goal, students in the course analyze historical uses of funds; understand project funding needs and free cash flow; analyze working capital management; choose among alternative sources of external funding for company operations; identify costs of funds and value securities; and evaluate investment opportunities.
Corporate Strategy, a management course, is designed to acquaint students with the delineation of business policy by a firm and the development and implementation of a business strategy that will allow the firm to achieve its goals and objectives. The pursuit of these goals and objectives usually occurs within a competitive context, in which other rival organizations seek similar if not the same ends (e.g., market share, profits, control of scarce resources, etc.). Accordingly, the essential drama of the marketplace is how one firm attempts to win vis-à-vis its rivals—that is, how it develops and implements a competitive strategy.
The basic perspective of the course is that of the general manager or person charged with overall responsibility for competitive performance. Concepts are applied to firms that compete in single businesses as well as multiple lines of activity; to firms that compete in domestic markets as well as international venues; and to firms that engage in both production- and service sector activity. The high-technology sector will be referenced, as will more mature and traditional industries.
This course is highly participatory, relying heavily on class discussions of case and related readings. A written group project is required of all students.
This core course aims to make students critical consumers of statistical analysis using available software packages. Key concepts include the interpretation of regression analysis; model formation and testing; and diagnostic checking.
This course surveys how to formulate, solve and interpret the mathematical models that assist a manager in decision-making. A model does not make a decision for a manager—rather, the information and insights provided by that model must be combined with a manager’s own experience and instincts. Decision models that are widely used in diverse businesses and industries are emphasized. The course’s primary goals are twofold: to make all students intelligent consumers of the decision models developed by others and to motivate students to supply decision models to their colleagues at work.
Until recently, decision models were seen as being for experts only. However, given advances in computer hardware/software and in data collection/storage/retrieval, today’s managers can quickly and inexpensively perform on their desktops what once required significant investments of time, space and money. Therefore, an important aspect of this course is the association with each major topic of a piece of software that you will own, learn and apply during the course and afterward.
This course provides managers with an awareness and understanding of accounting fundamentals, including the uses and limitations of accounting data in decision-making. Class sessions develop the fundamentals of each topic; explore its implications through examples (problem-solving); and incorporate the topic into the framework of the accounting process and the financial statements.
Two general, and somewhat unusual, themes run throughout the course. The first is that there is no truth in accounting; determining whether a financial accounting report is “good” or “bad” requires specifying who is reading the report. The second is that accounting can be reduced to tracking the difference between the flow of cash and the flow of wealth; if you can explain that difference then you know just about all there is to know from an accounting standpoint. These two themes are explained in detail in the first lecture.
This is a course in introductory macroeconomics with a strong emphasis on international applications. It has two objectives: The first is to develop simple models of the goods and services, assets, capital and labor markets that can be applied to generate realistic predictions regarding the behavior of such macroeconomic variables as output, employment, inflation, the current account, and interest and exchange rates. The second objective is to apply these models to understanding and interpreting current and historical macroeconomic developments, primarily in the industrialized OECD countries.
Performance Management/Managerial Accounting (half-term)
Managers need information to perform three essential functions in an organization: planning operations, controlling activities and making decisions. This course is concerned with how a manager should use accounting information within his or her organization. It aims to show what information is needed within an organization, where that information can be obtained and how it can be used by managers to plan, control and make decisions.
This course aims to help you define the basic concepts of economics, providing examples to illustrate these ideas; apply economic principles to the analysis of simple business situations; analyze problems using structured decision models; and integrate economic concepts and decision theory to examine complex business decisions.
While the course is primarily lecture-based, it is also quite interactive: there is frequent in-class discussion, and short individual and group exercises are required. In addition, there are several case-based classes.
Covering a wide variety of topics related to marketing management within private- and public-sector enterprises, this course focuses on three broad areas of management activity: the analytical prerequisites for strategic marketing planning; the development of strategies that simultaneously create economic value for the enterprise’s customers and owners; and the implementation of marketing programs. Where appropriate, the course integrates marketing issues with financial and operating strategy issues.
Some topics covered include:
• Strategic market planning frameworks
• Strategic growth options and their relationship to profitability
• Customer analysis: understanding the customer loyalty opportunity
• Industry analysis: business context analysis and scenario planning
• Competitor analysis: building unfair advantage and efficient innovation
• Organizational responses to environmental uncertainty
• Identifying and articulating unique customer value propositions
• Aligning internal operations with external strategic vision
• Building a customer-centric organization
In order to provide a sense of realism, the course introduces important concepts through the lecture and case method. Assigned readings, cases or other handouts serve as the basis for advanced discussion and application of strategy issues.
Operations, one of the primary functions of a firm, is concerned with the systematic design, management and improvement of the processes that transform inputs into finished goods or services. As marketing induces the demand for products and finance provides the capital, operations produces the product (goods and services).
This course provides a foundation for understanding the operations of a firm and provides the skills necessary to critically analyze a firm’s operating performance and practices. Unlike courses that treat the firm as a “black box,” we are primarily concerned with opening up the black box and discovering what makes a firm tick—or, for that matter, stop ticking. In contrast to management courses, the focus here is on the technological rather than human dimension of a firm’s internal operations—though there are obvious connections between the two that will be explored. In contrast to the measurement focus of accounting courses, the concern here is understanding what elements of a firm’s operations enable it to produce quality outputs at a competitive cost structure. That is, we focus on how the “physics” of material, work and information flows and the design and management of a firm’s processes interact to determine a firm’s cost structure and its ability to compete effectively in terms of such non-cost measures as quality, variety and speed.
Because the operations of a firm vary widely from one industry to the next, a course like this cannot cover all topics that are relevant to any given industry. Rather, a set of topics that are fundamental to understanding operations in a wide range of industries have been selected; these concepts are then illustrated using cases from a diverse set of businesses.
How can you motivate employees to go above and beyond the call of duty? How can you be sure that your decisions are not biased? What tactics can you use when you do not have the formal authority to tell someone what to do?
This course adds an understanding of life in complex organizations by covering topics spanning the micro, or individual, level of analysis (e.g., motivating employees, making effective decisions, matching compensation to jobs); the macro, or organizational level of analysis (e.g., designing an organization to fit with strategic objectives); and also topics that integrate these two levels (e.g., negotiation tactics, managing with power and developing a strong culture). The processes necessary to organize, motivate and lead people engaged in collective activities are explored; the course will also develop concepts and strategies to help you to become a more effective leader. Readings, cases, exercises and videos have been selected to illustrate the conceptual and applied aspects of individual, group and organizational behavior.
Required Courses
Students travel abroad for a week of learning through lectures or discussions with local business and government leaders. These groups may examine key businesses, factories and cultural sites in such cities as London, Munich, Santiago and Shanghai.
