MBA Course Index

This course supports your success as an effective communicator, innovator and business leader in an age that demands immediacy, authenticity, and transparency. Translating your ideas into successful initiatives requires a communication discipline with the capacity to connect with multiple audiences from diverse cultural, intellectual and professional backgrounds. Strategic Communication introduces the basics of communication strategy and persuasion: audience analysis, communicator credibility, and message construction and delivery. Written and oral presentation assignments derive from cases that focus on communication strategy. Students receive significant feedback and coaching to improve presentation and writing effectiveness. Students will also examine aligning an organization’s message with its business strategy and stakeholder expectations to achieve and maintain a strong reputation.

Accounting reports are an important means of communication with investors. This course focuses on the development analysis and use of these reports. It provides an understanding of what these reports contain, what assumptions and concepts accountants use to prepare them, and why they use those assumptions and concepts. The course uses simple examples to provide students with a clear understanding of accounting concepts. It stresses the ability to apply these concepts to real world cases which by their very nature are complex and ambiguous. In addition to text oriented materials, the classes also include cases so that students can discuss applications of basic concepts, actual financial reports, and news articles. In addition to traditional introductory topics, other topics may include mergers and acquisitions, purchase and pooling, free cash flow, and financial statement analysis.

This course aims to give you insight into how markets work. We will start by studying consumer and firm decision-making and how they interact with each other in markets. We will use tools based on game theory to understand firms’ strategic behavior in various situations. We conclude by analyzing how market conditions impact firm profitability and efficiency.

Microeconomics (as this course’s topic is frequently referred to) is an essential component of an MBA education. First, microeconomics gives us important insights into specific dimensions of optimal firm decision-making, such as pricing and entry and exit. Second, the formal economics perspective on business plays a vital role in other areas of MBA study, such as finance, strategy, and marketing. Some key concepts we will introduce include economic incentives, marginal analysis, opportunity cost, market competition, strategic behavior, and asymmetric information.

Our experience with students is that much of this is intuitive, but much is not, and we hope that the combination of theoretical structure and practical examples will provide you with valuable insights in the years to come.

This introductory finance course provides an overview of the main ideas and tools of analysis used in modern finance. We analyze the core financial decisions made by firms – the investment decision and the financing decision – and their impact on the value of the firm in the financial market. A large emphasis will be placed on how the theoretical concepts can be applied in practice. Topics that will be covered are: time value of money, introduction to valuation and the discounted cash flow (DCF) framework, financial planning and cash flow forecasting, corporate investments and capital budgeting, risk and return and portfolio theory, and capital structure and financial policy.

Organizations of all types face significant challenges. These include the difficulty of coping with highly dynamic business environments, the complexity of managing global enterprises, how to shape a healthy corporate culture, managing politics and conflict between individuals and organizational units, motivating a highly mobile and ever changing workforce, managing and harnessing intellectual capital, and so on. Such challenges and how organizational leaders can deal with them are the subject of this course.

This course has two major components. The first is “macro” in nature. It focuses on organizational level issues, such as how an organization should be designed to best achieve its goals and how culture and control affect organizational dynamics. The second part is more “micro” in nature. It focuses on employee-related challenges, such as how to get things done in politically sensitive environments, evaluate and reward people, and manage teams. The macro component is concerned with overall organizational performance while the micro component is concerned with managing individual and group effectiveness. And leadership is the linking pin that connects these two.

This course will introduce you to central theories and frameworks in management and organizational behavior. It will help you to understand how to apply those theories and frameworks to understand and address organizational challenges and problems. An understanding of organizations and their management is important for anyone who plans to work within an organization as career success hinges on one’s ability to accurately read and respond to the organizational context within which one operates. The course will also give you an opportunity to reflect on the skills that are required for being a better manager and leader.

This course provides an overall view of marketing in a customer driven firm, focusing on essential marketing skills needed by successful managers in all business functions. Topics include how individual and organizational consumers make decisions, segment markets, estimate the economic value of customers to the firm, position the firm’s offering, conduct effective marketing research, develop new products and pricing strategies, communicate with consumers, estimate advertising’s effectiveness, and manage relationships with sales force and distribution partners. The course also studies how firms must coordinate these different elements of the marketing mix to ensure that all marketing activities collectively forge a coherent strategy. The importance of combining qualitative and quantitative concepts in effective marketing analysis is also examined. The course uses a combination of lectures, class discussion, and case analysis.

Marketing is a core course and assumes no prior knowledge of marketing. However, there are certain concepts from Firms & Markets that students should have mastered including price elasticity of demand, price discrimination, marginal cost, marginal revenue, efficient scale for production capacity, diminishing returns, utility functions, and utility curves.

This course is designed to inspire you with a positive vision of what business can be, a realistic vision of what it often is, and a roadmap for how to navigate through the hazards and opportunities you will face in your career. You will learn:

• The types of traps that lure business professionals into ethical lapses and criminal behaviors.
• Moral psychology to understand how well-intentioned professionals can get lured into such traps.
• Conceptual frameworks that help you to navigate ethical gray zones with more confidence and better results.
• What characterizes companies with positive ethical values, and why you are better off working for them, or creating them.

You may, if you choose, commit yourself to a standard of professional conduct that will help to make your work more fulfilling and honorable.

This course is designed to achieve an understanding of fundamental notions of data presentation and data analysis and to use statistical thinking in the context of business problems. The course deals with modern methods of data exploration designed to reveal unusual or problematic aspects of databases.

This course studies two related issues. The first is how to gain advantage against competitors in the complex and dynamic global marketplace. Core business strategy themes include how to analyze the business environment, assess resources and capabilities, and choose competitive strategies. The second issue is how to create corporate value through configuring and coordinating multi-business activities. Core corporate strategy themes include analyzing scale and scope, evaluating corporate competencies, managing the multi-business corporation, and choosing corporate strategies.

We use the tools of international macroeconomics to explore the economic environment facing firms operating around the globe. Central issues include the role of economic policy and institutions in the performance of firms and nations; economic indicators and forecasting; employment and unemployment; interest rates, inflation, and monetary policy; global trade in goods and capital; foreign exchange rates; and emerging market crises. These issues are considered from the perspectives of both firms and countries.