Curriculum
The Executive MBA program provides the academic foundation to your career. The curriculum strives to deliver time-tested business skills, principles, and knowledge that managers need to function successfully in their organizations. This content is also infused with current issues and theory to take you to the cutting edge of managerial practice. This combination of the basics and emerging knowledge means that not only is your MBA immediately relevant to you in your work, it informs you throughout your career.
The curriculum is subject to change.
Core Curriculum Course Descriptions
Values Based Leadership: This course provides students with a frame work in which to develop their own leadership style according to their personal value propositions.
Economics Analysis for Managers: Managers regularly make choices, many of which are difficult. Economics logic often offers powerful and elegant insights into making those choices. A fundamental working knowledge of the firm's economic environment can improve both day-to-day managerial decision making and long-term strategic planning. The purpose of this course is to develop basic microeconomic concepts and apply them to issues of particular relevance to senior managers.
Corporate Financial Reporting: The course will provide students with an overview of choices available to managers in reporting corporate performance in financial statements. Topics include revenue recognition, inventory accounting, cash flow reporting, accounting for acquisitions, accounting for liabilities, disclosure issues, international differences in financial reporting, and financial statement analysis.
Management of Organizations: The course begins with a brief overview of the course and an examination of organizational strategy. Next, we look at teams in organizations and some phenomena that occur as teams make decisions. We follow with an examination of how and why people react to organizational change and identify opportunities for enhancing the effective implementation of change. Two topics of critical importance to organizations in dynamic environments—organizational resizing and organizational sustainability—are explored next. This is followed by an examination of the less fortunate situation of organizations in crisis and decline. A brief introduction to the theories that provide direction for motivating organizational members effectively is provided next, along with a simulation that applies this knowledge and students’ work experience. Next, interpersonal conflict in organizations is examined, followed by exploration of critical globalization issues and the importance of culture to an organization. The course finishes with time devoted to corporate governance.
Current Economic Environment: The purpose of this module is to develop a simple model of the United States economy that can be used to analyze the current economic environment. First we review the goals and implementation of monetary and fiscal policy, the problems associated with inflation, and the methods for measuring the overall performance of the economy. Next, we develop a simple model of the U.S. economy and apply it to provide a brief overview of U.S. economic performance over the past 30 years. We then focus on current issues, including the surplus, social security, and the extraordinary recent economic robustness. The intent is to provide a basic framework to interpret analysis of current and future movements in interest rates, inflation, growth and unemployment.
Marketing Management: An introduction to the elements of marketing management, with particular focus on new product, pricing, distribution, and promotion decisions. The use of customer and competitive analysis as input to strategy decisions will be emphasized. Selected case studies from a variety of industry contexts will be used.
Cost Accounting for Decision Makers: This course is designed to provide the student with an in-depth understanding of the role of management accounting information in the support of key strategic management issues and processes. Specifically, the course first starts with an in-depth presentation and understanding of Balanced Scorecard Reporting and the manner in which it supports strategic decision making. Next, we move downstream in the value chain and utilize activity-based costing to deal with strategic issues around customer mix and product distribution. Finally, we move upstream in the value chain to address important strategic issues of supplier relations, product design, and speed of product development. Again, all of these critical management issues are informed by managerial accounting information in the form of activity based costing.
Corporate Finance: The financial analysis of corporate decisions. The course develops the standard discounted cash flow framework, which is consistent with shareholder value maximization and Economic Value Added. This framework yields the techniques for analyzing both capital investment decisions and financing decisions. Emphasis is placed on an intuitive understanding of these techniques and their practical limitations.
Risk Strategy: This course explores the underlying motivations and theoretical frameworks for the demand of risk management as well as the supply of risk transfer and management instruments.
Risk, Perception and Decisions: This model introduces varying approaches to strategy focusing especially on dynamic strategies, as the organization deliberately anticipates and makes use of repeated change under varying conditions of uncertainty. Organizational learning, including both knowledge creating and deployment, plays a crucial role.
Negotiations: Managers spend a substantial portion of their time (20 percent, according to one study) and energy negotiating and resolving conflicts with superiors, coworkers, subordinates, customers, competitors and suppliers. The bargaining, negotiation, and conflict resolution skills of managers in these situations can have an important impact on the outcomes received by ALL parties. Poorly conducted negotiations can reduce the value of settlements both to the individual manager and other parties, or result in no settlement at all.
The two primary goals of this contemporary topics course are: first, to provide students with an understanding of theory and concepts of the bargaining process and outcomes. These theories are both normative (how negotiations should occur), drawing from economics and decision theory, and descriptive (how negotiations actually occur), drawing from behavioral decision theory. Second, this course intends to provide students with the opportunity to apply theoretical concepts and develop bargaining skills through in class examples and discussion, and, most prominently, negotiating exercises and cases. Together, knowledge of and experience with negotiation and conflict resolution will be enhanced.
Motivation & Leadership: This course is about managing people in organizations, and is designed for training future leaders. Based on research in organizational behavior and social psychology, the course focuses on studying motivational and leadership practices that have been proven to work in impacting individual and group performance in organizations. The main goals of the course are to: (a) discuss the science behind these practices, (b) demonstrate how they could be used to better understand, predict, and manage employee behavior at work, and (c) assess students’ motivation and leadership styles through psychometric scales.
Advanced Corporate Financial Management: This course examines in detail the basic decisions made by financial decision-makers. There is an emphasis on the formulation and implementation of financial solutions to corporate problems and opportunities. Topics include valuation models, options, corporate control, and mergers and acquisitions. The course will consist primarily of case discussions and analyses.
Legal Environment of Business: The purpose of this course is to prepare executives to recognize, analyze and respond to legal issues arising in their everyday business lives. This includes familiarizing themselves with "legal jargon" through lectures followed by case analysis, presentations and discussions. We discuss legal process, business organizations, intellectual property, and business torts.
Global Strategy: The course is concerned with the challenge of managing diversified and diversifying firms in global competitive environments. Cases coupled with readings will provide an understanding of resource identification, mobilization, exploration and exploitation through internal diversification, mergers and acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The course concludes with an executive network assessment of students’ personal resource bases and suggestions for augmenting those networks for personal strategic effectiveness. In project teams, students will also be tasked with developing and recommending a new business and corporate strategy to public company that serves as our class “client.”
Global Economics for Executives: This is a particularly interesting period in which to study global economics. The U.S. economy, which was widely regarded as a miracle economy of the 1990s, appears to have hit the wall. Although economic growth has again picked up in recent quarters, job growth is lagging in this recovery. Is global competition in the form of international trade and services outsourcing responsible for the sluggish job growth? If so, would it be wise to adopt policies that reduce trade or outsourcing of service tasks by U.S. companies? Is the U.S. trade deficit something that threatens our future prosperity? Will the U.S. repeat its strong performance of the 1990s in the coming decade? What causes fluctuations in exchange rates and how do they impact the profitability of firms? What decisions can firms take to optimize their performance in a world of exchange rate uncertainty? Our goal is to show how economic models can help us understand the consequences of globalization, services outsourcing, and trade imbalances, with an emphasis in the second part of the course on exchange rates.
International Financial Management for Executives: This course deals with the application of finance principles to international business decisions. The focus is on the following key principles:exchange rate behavior, currency risk management, financing operations in the global capital markets, cross border investment analysis and project finance. The course builds on the foundations of cash flow analysis in multi-currency environments, key interest/discount rate relationships across currencies, evaluation of assets subject to political risk and international tax system interactions. Case studies are used to generate applications of these core foundations.
Global Learning Experience: The financial analysis of corporate decisions. The course develops the standard discounted cash flow framework, which is consistent with shareholder value maximization and Economic Value Added. This framework yields the techniques for analyzing both capital investment decisions and financing decisions. Emphasis is placed on an intuitive understanding of these techniques and their practical limitations.
Business Communications: This course will expose students to the concepts and challenges of communication within the business arean. The central focus will be on effective communication within an organization and externally with the press and external stakeholders.
Strategic Leadership: This model introduces varying approaches to strategy focusing especially on dynamic strategies, as the organization deliberately anticipates and makes use of repeated change under varying conditions of uncertainty. Organizational learning, including both knowledge creating and deployment, plays a crucial role.
Immediate Impact
"I've already seen direct application from the program in my daily work activities. There are many times senior management will point out when we're talking about business development, 'Oh, Marian's here. She's in the Executive MBA program. She can help with that.' It's something that seems to pop up on a regular basis."
Marian Piekarczyk, Executive MBA 2010
Assistant Director of Operations
WiCell Research Institute