List of Concentrations

General Management

The view from the top starts at the bottom, with an understanding of the fundamental disciplines that underlie business. Chicago Booth’s focus on the fundamentals – versus the fads – has produced leaders worldwide, nearly 5,000 of whom are CEOs or other top company officers. The General Management concentration reinforces your ability to think through unique problems, make sound decisions, and lead.

Chicago Booth goes beyond providing a solid program in general management. It goes without saying that you will gain expertise in the core responsibilities of general managers - finance, human resource management, managerial accounting, operations management, and macroeconomics. You will enrich that understanding with courses from strategic management or managerial and organizational behavior that will add an additional leadership dimension to your skill set, but you won’t stop there. With our flexible curriculum, you can elect to target specific business areas or functions to tailor your path to your ultimate goal. You won’t just see the big picture – you’ll shape it yourself.

COCURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
COURSE SAMPLING
FACULTY SAMPLING

COCURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
You'll have the chance to explore operations outside the classroom in numerous ways that will also allow you to build new skills, relationships and networks. These include:

Corporate Management Strategy Group

The Corporate Management and Strategy Group promotes the development of general management and strategy skills among Chicago Booth students. We bring students, faculty, and the business community together to help students develop functional and managerial skills; foster relationships with companies and facilitate recruiting in corporate management and strategy; and provide guidance and support to members throughout the recruiting process.

Managerial Effectiveness Group

The Managerial Effectiveness Group aims to develop better managers and leaders by helping students develop and polish their "soft-skill" repertoire. Our focus is on interpersonal communication, conflict management, group-skills, influencing, motivation and other such soft-skills. We invite management gurus, leading faculty members, senior executives from top firms, and leadership consultants to deliver lectures, conduct skill-building workshops, and network with students interested in furthering their leadership skills.

Management Conference

For over 55 years, Chicago Booth's Management Conference has combined the very best in conceptual knowledge and academic theory with practical application. Each year, world-renowned Chicago Booth faculty and a diverse gathering of alumni, business leaders, economists and other professionals discuss latest groundbreaking business ideas, new perspectives and research. Read about the recent event.

A.T. Kearney Global Case Competition

Want to get a taste of life as a consultant? Want to test your interview skills and apply lessons you're learning at business school? Want to team with your classmates to address a real-life business challenge? Want to represent your school in a competition against other leading business schools? Each autumn, MBA students from select business schools participate in the A.T. Kearney Global Prize case competition. Acting as management consulting teams, you tackle a case based on an actual A.T. Kearney client engagement. Throughout the process, you will have the opportunity to interact with our consultants as they act as the client in simulations, provide feedback on your efforts, and share their insights on the consulting process.

COURSE SAMPLING
You’ll have the option of taking courses that address your individual career choices. Samples include:

Theories of Leadership

This course examines business leadership in an attempt to establish the nature of leadership and the ways in which "leadership" differs from "management." Business leadership is compared to political and military leadership. The extent to which leadership can affect firm performance is assessed. The course uses studies of leadership, films, and presentations by corporate leaders.

Network Structures of Effective Management

Success requires two things: being technically competent and being able to effectively manage social relationships. This course combines sociology and economics to introduce general principles of management with an emphasis on how the management of relationships has real and hard outcomes for you as someone attempting to create value and advance your career. The goal is to provide you with a set of tools that you can use immediately and effectively. You will learn about group and individual decision-making, team dynamics, the ethics of managing work relationships, the role of leadership, trust in organizations, employee diversity, entrepreneurship, and the functioning of professional markets.

Building Innovation Strategy and Capability

Fortune 100 CEOs increasingly list innovation in their top 5 areas of concern. High performing companies are migrating to innovation models that involve everyone. Leaders who understand how to enable a cadence of innovation through others will create a competitive advantage. Students will learn and apply three levels of knowledge: 1) innovation best practices of global organizations, 2) how to embed innovation in an organization through business processes and core competencies, 3) capability tools to create a pipeline of innovations. The course will uniquely focus on both rational and behavioral drivers to deliver innovation in an enterprise.

Strategic Planning

The fundamental challenge of senior managers is executing the current strategy to meet near-term performance objectives and simultaneously making the right investments to support long-term growth. Strategic planning, done right, provides the platform for senior managers to meet this challenge. The primary focus of this course is on concepts, frameworks, and tools for engaging in long-term planning, with a secondary focus on the development of strategic plans for executing the current strategy.

FACULTY SAMPLING
You’ll study with professors who conduct groundbreaking research, collaborate with the entrepreneurial and private equity communities, and bring their own entrepreneurial experiences into the classroom.

	Ronald S. Burt, studies the social structure of competitive advantage in careers, organizations, and markets. Burt is the author of six books, two software programs, and numerous articles and chapters in academic works.		Robert H. Gertner, focuses his research primarily on industrial organization, resource allocation and decision making in organizations, corporate investment, law and economics, and strategic pricing.
	Harry L. Davis, studies leadership, strategy, creativity and innovation. He developed the first core leadership program of any top-rated MBA program in the country and also pioneered the Management Lab.		Christopher K. Hsee, conducts research on the interplay between psychology and economics, happiness, marketing, and cross-cultural psychology. He serves or has served on the editorial boards of several academic journals, including the Journal of Marketing Research,Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Behavior Decision Making, and Management and Organization Review.
	Nicholas Epley, conducts research on the experimental study of social cognition, perspective taking, and intuitive human judgment. His research has appeared in more than two dozen journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. His research also has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Wired, and National Public Radio, among many others, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation.		Damon J. Phillips, studies social structural approaches to labor and product markets, organizational strategy and structure, as well as social network theory and analysis. His research has led to advancements in both the understanding of labor markets and entrepreneurship, and incorporates these advancements into his classes on management and strategic leadership.
	Ayalet Fishbach, studies social psychology, with specific emphasis on motivation, emotion, and decision making. She is the recipient of several international awards, including the Society of Experimental Social Psychology's Best Dissertation Award and the Fulbright Educational Foundation Award.		Richard H. Thaler, studies behavioral economics and finance as well as the psychology of decision-making which lies in the gap between economics and psychology. His latest book, Nudge, has found favor is influencing political thinkers in both the United States and England.