You'll have the chance to explore activities outside the classroom in numerous ways that will also allow you to build new skills, relationships, and networks. These include:
- Booth Leadership Group - The Booth Leadership Group provides opportunities for members to hone their soft-skills and learn managerial effectiveness via interactive workshops, presentations from industry leaders, panels with faculty, alumni, and networking with fellow students.
- 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 the latest groundbreaking business ideas, new perspectives, and research.
- Workshop in the Theory of Organizations - This workshop focuses on advanced research on economics of organizations and theory of the firm, with applications to financial markets and institutions. Research papers are presented by faculty and advanced PhD students, as well as visiting speakers from other universities.
You’ll have the option of taking courses that address your individual career choices. Samples include:
- Strategic Leadership - 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. The material is approached from the perspective of you as an entrepreneurial manager/leader trying to get things done. This focuses the discussion on the central task of creating value through coordination: coordinating your personal contacts to diverse groups in an organization, coordinating employees within and between the functional groups in an organization, and coordinating business activities across diverse markets. Principles of social organization indicate how best to coordinate those interests to create value. This course is an introduction to those principles and their application.
- Managerial Decision Making - In some business situations, we can make decisions analytically and "optimally." But more often than not, we do not have the time or the information to engage in analytical decision-making, and we have to rely on our intuition and experiences to resolve important decisions. This course teaches you how to make decisions in both types of situations. With respect to the first type of situation, I will share with you analytical tools and teach you how to use them to reach optimal solutions. With respect to the second type of situation, I will help you discover errors "normal people" often commit when they make decisions intuitively, and teach you how to overcome these errors and thereby become "less normal," namely, smarter than the average person. Many topics we will cover are based on the Nobel Prize-winning research on behavioral decision theory; it is the foundation of behavioral economics, behavioral marketing, and behavioral finance.
- Strategies and Processes of Negotiation - Managerial success requires agreement and collaboration with other people. The course is designed to be relevant to the broad spectrum of negotiation problems that are faced by managers, and to teach you the skills necessary to discover and implement optimal solutions to these problems. These skills include an understanding of the problem at hand, the other parties involved, the common biases in the judgments and decisions of negotiators, and the effective tactics of social influence.
You’ll study with professors who conduct groundbreaking research, consult with companies, and bring their real-world experience on how to navigate the challenges presented by a complex organization into the classroom.
Eugene M. Caruso, studies social judgment, group decision-making and negotiation, egocentrism, perspective-taking, and ethics. His published work includes "The Costs and Benefits of Undoing Egocentric Responsibility Assessments in Groups" and "When Perspective Taking Increases Taking: Reactive Egoism in Social Interaction," both written with N. Epley and M. H. Bazerman and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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.
Ayelet 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.
Linda E. Ginzel, specializes in managerial psychology and leadership, negotiation skills, organizational behavior, and the social psychology of organizations. She is the two-time recipient of the James S. Kemper Jr. Grant in Business Ethics. Ginzel is the president and chair of Kids In Danger, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting children by improving children's product safety.
Reid Hastie, is best known for his research on legal decision-marking and on social memory and judgment processes. He has written a textbook, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making, in collaboration with Robyn Dawes of Carnegie Mellon University.
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.
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 in and is influencing political thinkers in both the United States and England.
Bernd Wittenbrink, is interested in the psychology of person perception and social judgment, specifically the impact that stereotypes and group attitudes may have on people's decisions and behaviors. His research has been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and Social Cognition. His book on recent developments in attitude measurement, Implicit Measures of Attitudes, coauthored with N. Schwarz, is published by Guilford Press.