Course Descriptions

Our Executive MBA curriculum was designed with you in mind. Relevance and practicality are the hallmark qualities of our courses. In addition to theory and principles, we teach new skills and techniques that you can immediately apply to your work environment. From the first day on, you'll see a difference in your business expertise and productivity—and so will your colleagues and clients.

First Year

• Intensive Week (Fall Semester)
• Fall Semester
• Spring Semester
• Summer Semester

Second Year

• Intensive Week (Fall Semester)
• Fall Semester
• Spring Semester

First Year

Intensive Week (Fall Semester)

Team Effectiveness: This course is an experiential introduction to working in teams. The course is designed to enhance students' participation in teams through the development of a theoretical understanding of basic concepts. Using cases, the class leads students through common challenges that teams face. In addition, the course discusses tools to address these challenges and identify them as opportunities for proactive and thoughtful action. The course emphasizes early stage teams, with a focus on teambuilding. The course provides students with opportunities to develop their own skills as team members in their own student study groups.

Ethics and Foundations of Business Thought: Personal and organizational values and ethics are discussed in an environment of competing and complementary rights and monetary goals. Readings of a classic nature are presented to underscore the timeless and multi-cultural nature of business and the relevancy of great works to today's business environment.

Fall Semester

Financial Accounting: Introduces the basic concepts, standards and practices of financial reporting to serve the needs of decision-makers. Basic financial statements, analysis and recording of transactions, and underlying concepts and procedures are covered. Other topics covered include accounting for inventories, long-term productive assets, bonds, and other liabilities, stockholders’ equity, and the statement of cash flows. This provides students with an understanding of how financial statements are prepared, the ability to interpret the information provided in financial statements, the ability to conduct a preliminary financial statement analysis of a firm, and the ability to forecast a firm’s financial statements.

Leadership and Management in High Performance Organizations: This course addresses the diagnosis and management of human behavior in organizations. One of the keys to your success as a manager or leader is the ability to generate energy and commitment among people within an organization and to channel that energy and commitment toward critical organizational goals in an ethical and responsible way. Doing so requires a thorough understanding of the root causes of human attitudes and behavior, as well as knowledge of how your actions and the surrounding organizational context influence those attitudes and behaviors. The course is designed to help you develop this understanding of human behavior in order to enhance your managerial /leadership effectiveness. The specific learning goals of the course are: 1. To increase your conceptual and analytical knowledge about human behavior in complex organizations at the individual, interpersonal, group, and intergroup level and to examine how organizational, societal, and cultural contexts affect these behaviors; 2. To increase your awareness of your own and others’ assumptions, motivations, and values in managerial and organizational interaction; 3. To sharpen your skills in problem definition, enrich your set of diagnostic models, and refine the process you use to generate and select action alternatives.

Communication and Interpersonal Effectiveness: This course focuses on the communication and interpersonal skills needed for success in leadership, teamwork, and high performance settings. Our focus is on communication fundamentals (communicating clearly, directly, and supportively), perception, mindfulness, managing emotions, and non-verbal awareness. The course format is based around lectures, discussions, group activities, and formal presentations.

Spring Semester

Statistics: Statistics provides a systematic approach to make intelligent, fact-based decisions and to improve processes. The emphasis is on understanding concepts and their application to real world business situations. The conceptual material focuses on the importance of statistical thinking to make sound business decisions. The statistical methods are implemented using a computer to analyze business and economic data sets, with emphasis on interpreting the output. Topics covered include statistical and process thinking, six sigma principles and metrics, summary statistics, probability, distributions, sampling, statistical inference (confidence intervals and hypothesis testing), and the study of relationships (regression and correlation).

Corporate Finance: This course develops a framework that can be applied for financial planning and for analyzing the major types of investment decisions made by firms with an emphasis on the efficient allocation of resources within the organization. Topics include the formulation of financial plans and estimating financing needs, financial mathematics, valuation of real and financial assets, capital budgeting and corporate investment decisions, risk and return, and the cost of capital.

Marketing Management: Provides an overview and integration of major marketing management concepts and principles. The course covers the fundamentals of marketing strategy and the decisions related to marketing that must be made in every profit or nonprofit organization. Emphasis is placed on the application of these concepts to marketing decisions with the goal of developing or enhancing students' skills at critically thinking about marketing management issues. Topics for discussion will include external analysis of the competition and customer, internal analysis of the decision-making company, and formulation of marketing mix decisions.

International Finance: This course addresses how international factors affect the operating, investing, and financing functions of a firm. Students will learn about global financing tools managers can use to maximize the value of their firms. In almost any market, companies are affected by global factors; even a firm with no current international operations will be subject to potentially severe currency exchange rate risk. Additionally, non-domestic markets often represent the most important growth area for many organizations. Understanding and managing the risks that come with cross-border operations is crucial in shaping a firm’s growth strategy. The key objectives of the course are to

• Understand the role of foreign currency exchange and how it affects both multinational and domestic-only firms
• Understand the effects of political risk on the multinational organization
• Understand the use of currency forward, futures, and options contracts and their role in hedging risk inherent in a firm’s cash flows, even in domestic-only firms
• Understand how to pose and analyze the capital budgeting decision of the multinational company
• Understand the importance of global corporate governance practices for strategic partnering and investing decisions

Summer Semester

Operations Management: Firms transform raw materials into finished goods through some kind of production process. For example, in a hospital, sick patients are the "raw materials" that are transformed into cured patients, representing "finished goods." In this course we develop a framework with which to analyze business processes, that is, the flow of work within the firm. With the help of case studies, we identify ways that a firm can increase its profitability by improving process management. We follow this with a look at supply chain management, which involves the management of operations across firm boundaries, and with a study of quality management, inventory policies, and other topics. Superior operations management creates significant competitive advantage for the firm, and according to some economists, has significantly contributed to the strikingly less volatile economy we now enjoy.

Economics: Teaches the basic principles of microeconomics and macroeconomics and their usefulness in making business decisions. The course covers supply and demand, individual’s consumption, savings, and labor behavior. In addition, the course analyzes both short-run fluctuations and long-run growth of the aggregate economy. Topics include profit maximization, utility maximization, demand, supply, uncertainty, game theory, agency theory, booms and recessions, inflation and unemployment, monetary and fiscal policy, budget and trade deficits, and interest and exchange rates.

Second Year

Intensive Week (Fall Semester)

Negotiations and Conflict Management: The purpose of this course is to understand the theory and processes of negotiation in a variety of managerial contexts. The course is designed to be relevant to the various kinds of negotiation problems that are faced by managers. The course complements the technical and diagnostic skills learned in other courses. A basic premise of the course is that while a manager needs analytical skills to discover optimal solutions to problems, a broad array of negotiation skills is needed for these solutions to be accepted by others and implemented in collaboration with them. The course will allow participants the opportunity to develop these skills experientially and to understand negotiation in useful analytical frameworks.

Competitive Advantage through Human Resources: This course focuses on organizing and managing people to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. The people-centered management strategies used by high performance firms will be examined, emphasizing both research and leading-edge practices. The following topics will be explored; attracting, developing, motivating and retaining talent to support strategic HR objectives during good and bad times; designing high performance organization through effective recruitment and selection processes (Behavioral Interviewing); building a flexible and capable workforce through effective coaching and positive discipline; managing work/life balance to reduce turnover and increase employee satisfaction and effective performance evaluation and outcome measurement.

Fall Semester

Advanced Marketing Strategies: Provides a forum for students to deepen their understanding of contemporary marketing and to develop skills for successful market development. Topics include areas such as new product development, new product introduction, the marketing, manufacturing, design interface, brand management, pricing, product line management, and channel development including emerging channels.

Advanced Leadership: In this course we discuss two topics related to leadership. The first is the development of leadership behaviors and attributes as skill sets. The course emphasizes self-reflection exercises to draw out strengths and areas of opportunity for individual students, to help in leadership development. The second is the development of skills to manage change in organizations, a specific area of leadership that is increasingly relevant. The course uses project work to evaluate, design, and develop skills related to leading change in organizations.

Spring Semester

Managing in the Global Economy: This course focuses on the modern global environment of business and the strategic and organizational responses of firms to this environment. The first section of the course, Dynamics of the Global Environment, will cover topics such as the global capital system, international political institutions, cultural differences in a global world, and technology and the global system. The second part of the course, Managing the Global Enterprise, will move to firm-level issues, to include international and global strategy, organizing the global enterprise, and networks and alliances in global industry. The final section of the course, From Global to Local, brings environmental and corporate concerns into focus in the foreign market. It will cover such topics as market entry strategies, the impact of globalization on national cultures, the role of multinational firms from emerging markets, and in general the clash of the industrialized world and the developing world.

Advanced Finance: The objectives are twofold: to apply corporate financial concepts to case situations; and to introduce more advanced concepts in corporate and investment finance. Topics include financial statement analysis, forecasting of financial statements, estimation of a firm's required return, determination of appropriate capital structure, application of risk management, analysis of appropriate dividend policies, economic value-added analysis, and estimation of firm valuation. The above topics are focused on financial strategies from the prospective of management, lenders, and investors.

Strategy: Introduces the basic concepts and tools for formulating business strategy. Focuses on how firms can develop sustainable competitive advantages. Central topics include assessing industry economics and dynamics to identify strategic threats and opportunities, evaluating the profit potential of strategic resources and capabilities, and strategic diversification. Other topics include assessing actual and potential cost and differentiation advantages, vertical scope of the firm, strategic management of multi-business firms, global strategy, strategic alliances, strategic management in technology-intensive industries, and strategy under uncertainty.

Strategic Cost Management: Focuses on firms’ internal accounting information systems and their use in decision-making, planning and control, and performance evaluation. The objectives are threefold: to increase the students’ understanding of the data accumulation and allocation processes; to illustrate the proper application of these accounting data to solving managerial problems; and to expose the students to the strategic implications and limitations of the accounting systems and data. Applications considered include cost estimation, pricing and product mix decisions, activity-based costing, measuring opportunity costs for decision-making and transfer pricing. As such, the course integrates the knowledge of firms’ internal accounting systems with problems confronting managers in the areas of finance, accounting, marketing, operations management, and human resources.

International Field Study: Developing a broad global perspective is essential to understanding the international business environment. Executive MBA students travel abroad the final session of their program. Students experience first-hand the strategic and organizational systems in the modern global industry. Observing business practices and customs and gaining an understanding of cultural, financial, and political ramifications will prepare you for business decision-making on a global level. Students will tour renowned firms and have direct contact with high-level executives and government officials. Previous Executive MBA classes have visited Argentina, Chile, China, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Switzerland.