Curriculum

Overview | Business Fundamentals | Managerial Leadership | Electives | Concentrations

The general management curriculum, with its emphasis on strategy and leadership, is designed to refresh, expand, and strengthen your grounding in the fundamental disciplines of business so that you are better equipped on the job and in the future. You'll also gain the business tools and analytical thinking to be able to put everything together — the economics of HR, the financial business case, writing skills, brand strategy, negotiation techniques, and more.

During the 21-month program, you will take 15 of the 17 courses together with your colleagues. Each student then selects two electives to complete the course of study. Together with group assignments and study groups, this format encourages you to build camaraderie and share experiences — a valuable component of the learning process. See the program timeline which describes the order in which courses are taken.

You can also earn a concentration in finance or strategy through two additional courses. If you decide to earn a concentration, you will need to take an additional week of classes and pay additional tuition.

For more in-depth course descriptions, click on each course title, or click the section headers for a full list of courses with descriptions.

Electives

This is a sample of previous electives courses:

Advanced Marketing Strategy
Strategies and Processes of Negotiation
Corporate Restructuring Entrepreneurial Finance and Private Equity
Investment and Finance in China
Strategic Investment Decisions
Theory and Policy of Modern Finance

MANAGERIAL LEADERSHIP

These courses are breadth courses that examine the concepts and techniques required for effective management. Taught from a managers’ perspective, these courses offer a deep dive into the frameworks that shape our professional communities and relationships. Utilizing tools in the areas of accounting, economics, psychology, sociology and statistics, you will learn to be a better leader.

Entrepreneurial Strategy

Entrepreneurial Strategy is a capstone course that requires students to integrate new frameworks and concepts in strategy with frameworks and tools they learn throughout the program. The first half of the course focuses on strategy for entrepreneurial activities, either start-up companies or new businesses within existing organizations. We will study the generation and evaluation of ideas for new businesses, choices among business models, go-to-market strategies, and financial modeling of a start-up. In addition to lectures and case analysis, student groups will generate and evaluate ideas for a new business (or business unit) and choose the most promising idea, which they will use for a project in the second half of the course. The second half of the course will involve developing a business plan (or presentation of it) for their chosen venture. Groups will be expected to incorporate knowledge, frameworks, and tools from a large selection of courses including marketing, operation, management, accounting, finance, strategy, statistical analysis, and economics into their business plan. The course will end with presentations of the business plans to faculty, alumni, and fellow students. Students will have an opportunity to present a preliminary version of their plan early in the second half of the course, and much of the second half will involve working to improve and refine the plan with advice from faculty and coaches.

Strategic Leadership

Strategic Leadership encourages participants to use the social structure around them to identify opportunities to create value, mobilize resources around the opportunities, and organize to deliver value. Case-based class discussions serve as a framework for exploring high performance teams, corporate culture, reputations, leading strategic change, leveraging best practices, communicating a vision, reading the informal organization, and integrating operations across business units.

Marketing Management

Marketing Management develops an understanding of and skill in formulating and planning marketing strategies. Understanding, developing, and evaluating brand strategies over the life of a product are key components of the course. Topics also include strategies for pioneering brands and later entrants and strategies for growth in declining markets.

Global Economics

Course description not available at this time

Operations

Operations concentrates on organizational operations concepts and processes from a general manager’s perspective. Three critical concepts form the base of this course: locating and costing bottlenecks, reducing variability, and managing variability. These concepts provide insight into process analysis, quality, inventory control, capacity planning, and location.

Competitive Strategy

Competitive Strategy applies concepts from microeconomics and industrial organization to competitive decision making. Case discussions serve as a foundation for learning in this class. Topics covered include industry analysis, basic game theory, competitive interactions, competitive pricing, commitment, and antitrust.

Financial Strategy

Financial Strategy takes a financial approach to managerial decision making. Funds needs, financing decisions, and investment decisions are discussed. Understanding how financial decisions affect firm value is a focus of the course. Case discussions of large, small, international, and country-specific firms provide the main vehicle for learning in this course.

Managerial Accounting

Managerial Accounting sheds light on why some managers use numerous, seemingly sub-optimal accounting practices and explores why firms are adopting activity–based costing (ABC), economic value added (EVA), and balanced scorecard. Emphasis is placed on the question of organizational motivation and control and the role of accounting in this context.

Managerial Decision Making and Negotiation

Managerial Decision Making and Negotiation has two goals: a descriptive goal that helps students understand how managers actually make decisions and a prescriptive goal that helps students become better decision makers and negotiators. Through readings, demonstrations, and cases, students learn why managers are susceptible to certain decision-making biases and subsequently make less than optimal decisions. The course explores the implications of these biases for consumer, organizational, and financial decision making. In the second part of the course, a series of negotiation simulations helps students develop a structured approach to preparation and a refined set of skills for carrying out negotiations.

Marketing Management II

Marketing Management II expands on the concepts developing in the introductory marketing course and provides greater focus on strategic marketing planning, tactical selection and execution. Additional emphasis will be placed on effectively capturing and analyzing marketing data in order to make good marketing decisions and on the strategic nature of particular marketing tactics such as pricing and integrated marketing communications.

BUSINESS FUNDAMENTALS

These courses focus on developing analytical tools and knowledge that support the rest of the curriculum. Your class will include students with diverse professional backgrounds crossing many industries and job functions. These fundamental courses examine the building blocks of the business world and provide an opportunity, among other things, to get your classmates on a level playing field before moving on to the Managerial Leadership section of the curriculum.

Statistics

Statistics provides a comprehensive treatment of basic statistical concepts and analytical tools for data-driven decision makers as well as a focused look at developing strategic directions for new business units or firms. Topics covered include time series, categorical data, random variables and their distributions, variability, and regression models. Priority is given to understanding the concepts and their relevance to business.

Macroeconomics

Macroeconomics analyzes both short-run fluctuations and long-run growth of the aggregate economy. Topics include booms and recessions, inflation and unemployment, monetary and fiscal policy, budget and trade deficits, interest and exchange rates, and the productivity slowdown.

Corporate Finance for Executives

Corporate Finance for Executives focuses on the interactions between financial structures and the value of the underlying real assets. After a short introduction to capital budgeting and valuation methods, the course focuses on the process of capital structure decisions. Recent theories in corporate finance are illustrated through a series of examples and cases. Special emphasis is placed on the ways in which financing affects the incentive structure of financial claimants.

Microeconomics

Microeconomics focuses on the basic economic principles of the firm and their relevance in business decisions. The course covers supply and demand and its relation to market behavior followed by economic determinants of individuals' consumption, savings, and labor behavior.

Financial Accounting

Financial Accounting provides the insight to see through the numbers by developing your understanding of the language of business and how financial statements are prepared and enhancing your ability to interpret financial statements, conduct preliminary financial analyses of a firm, and forecast a firm's financial performance.

Essentials of Effective Leadership

Essentials of Effective Leadership focuses on increasing a manager's understanding about the nature and dynamics of interpersonal behavior related to organizational performance by providing an introduction to theory and research in the behavioral sciences. Using a combination of case discussions, group activities, and lectures, the primary goal is to offer conceptual frameworks and principles that will improve managerial effectiveness. Topics covered include motivation, social perception, interpersonal influence, communication, group decision making, commitment, and leadership.