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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 be an effective leader.

The Chicago Booth curriculum 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.


Co-curricular Activities

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:

  • Corporate Strategy and Management Group - The CSMG provides a forum for students who have an interest in corporate strategy and general management.
  • 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.

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

  • Strategic Leadership
  • The Strategy Symposium - This course brings together a group of about 30 students to meet with faculty and visitors (business executives and others) to explore strategy issues and ideas in greater depth. The goals of the course will be to develop a better understanding of methods and techniques for strategic thinking and to explore the design, implementation, and evaluation of strategy. One important goal is to develop tools and concepts for evaluating strategies both before and after the outcome is known and to seek insights that will improve the process of designing strategy.
  • Managerial Decision Making - In many business situations it is not possible to solve a decision-making problem analytically. Because of data limitations and/or computational difficulties, an intuitive approach must be used. In such situations, decision-makers are subject to systematic biases and errors. That is, their decisions predictably diverge from optimal solutions. This course is devoted to understanding the nature, causes, and implications of these human decision-making limitations. The class begins with a series of demonstrations of decision-making biases so that the students experience the biases, firsthand. Then, various judgment and decision- making biases are presented in turn. The stress is on managerial implications with special emphasis given to applications in finance, marketing, economics, and organizations.

You’ll study with professors who conduct groundbreaking research, consult with companies, and bring their real-world experience into the classroom.

  • Ronald S. Burt 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.
  • Harry L. Davis 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.
  • Nicholas Epley 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 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.
  • Robert H. Gertner 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.
  • Christopher K. Hsee 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 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.

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