Our Core Curriculum

Learn the bookkeeping mechanics and the economic concepts, such as assets, liabilities, and income, that provide the foundation of accounting systems around the world.

Learn the analytical tools needed to tackle economic problems, which arise whenever agents engage in trade or make economic tradeoffs. Topics include supply and demand, consumers, production, equilibrium, imperfect competition, and competitive strategy.

Get a conceptual framework for analyzing group dynamics, diagnosing performance problems, and designing appropriate interventions, and develop practical skills for building effective groups and teams.

Understand and apply concepts and statistical methods including probability, simulation, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, and applied regression modeling.

Learn to use tools from economics, marketing, organizational behavior, accounting, and politics to achieve success in competitive environments. This course emphasizes anticipating the actions of the marketplace participants, including governments, nonprofit organizations, and corporations, that function as competitors and cooperators.

Develop a deep understanding of customer behavior, integrate that understanding across an organization, and align the organizational structure to satisfy current customer needs and adapt to changes in customer needs, using tools from economics, psychology, and sociology.

This course develops a framework for understanding the causes and consequences of macroeconomic events in real time, a useful input to the management of any enterprise, local or global, profit or nonprofit. 

Global Virtual Teams introduces students to the core knowledge that will help them to effectively lead, manage, and function in task-performing groups and teams, and helps students develop the practical skills needed to apply the conceptual frameworks in their own teams and organizations. 

Innovator studies issues of idea generation, idea evaluation and development, creative projects, and fostering and sustaining innovation in organizations. Students generate ideas in a number of contexts, and evaluate ideas that they and others have generated in terms of customer adoption and feasibility.

This course is about investors: what they do, how they think, and what they care about. Course topics include returns, risk, and prices; asset allocation; efficient markets; valuation and fundamentals-based investing; the capital asset pricing model (CAPM); quantitative equity investing; bond markets; evaluating money manager performance; futures and options; and investment errors and human psychology.

Learn how to approach, analyze, and solve complex problems in a structured way, using Excel tools, linear optimization techniques, and decision trees. View problems through multiple lenses and think across disciplines to clarify and define problems. Understand risk and the biases that distort decision making.

Learn a conceptual framework for analyzing and shaping negotiation processes and outcomes. The course presents strategies for creating value and capturing as much of that value as possible.

The course broadens the traditional operations management course by emphasizing linkages to organizational behavior and workforce management, strategy, accounting, finance, and marketing. At its heart, this course uses quantitative models to provide managerial insights into the improvement of work processes, the design and improvement of the supply chain, and the competitive strategy.

Organizations are fundamentally political entities, and power and influence are keys to getting things done. It is important to be able to diagnose organizational politics in order to form and implement new strategies. This course focuses on the art and science of influence in organizations, how to build cooperative networks, understand one's own leadership profile and determine the ethical challenges of leadership.

This course considers groups within the firm tasked to raise money from different sources as well as manage different aspects of those funds within the organization. Topics include measuring corporate value creation, company valuation, capital structure decisions, and capital budgeting.

State and Society helps students understand how organizations interact with the societies that surround them, examining the role of nonmarket constituencies such as public officials and NGOs; legal and regulatory environments around the world; and the impact of societal trends on the opportunities and risks faced by businesses.

This course enhances the student’s capability as a manager and leader to take actions that align employees’ actions with organizational goals and objectives, using levers such as recruitment and selection; employee evaluation and development; extrinsic rewards, compensation systems, and job design; and the connection between the employee’s identity and organizational objectives. The course concludes by discussing how employment relationships are shaped by values and ethics—those of the manager, as well as those of the larger organization.

The curriculum culminates in The Executive, which teaches you to take a CEO’s view of the entire organization and tackle major challenges. This course consists of a series of interdisciplinary cases structured to describe challenges faced by leaders of organizations of differing size, scope, and sector, asking students to bring together skills learned throughout the core curriculum. 

Advanced Negotiations follows the first-year “Core Negotiations” course, both of which help students better negotiate with investors, clients, bosses, and perhaps most formidable of all, friends and family. Through practice cases, students will obtain a set of tools (e.g., how to discover and execute efficient trade-offs) to improve the ways in which they create and claim value.  

This course examines the ethical dimensions of business. Questions addressed include “In whose interests should firms be managed?”, “What rules guide firms’ engagement with customers?”, and “Should firms try to solve social problems?” We will discover the tools  for reasoning about right and wrong through discussion and debate about the readings.

Competitive Strategy develops a broad approach for evaluating the prospects for firm profits. It looks at many firms across a broad range of markets. We will spend some time on managerial and behavioral issues and/or institutional details. We will derive the principles we apply mainly from microeconomic theory. 

Using both lectures and cases, the class provides a framework for applying corporate financial theory to applications that involve capital budgeting, valuation, capital structure, raising capital, mergers, and financial restructuring. The course focus then shifts to outside of the corporation to explore issues related to corporate governance and compensation.

Managerial Controls focuses on the use of internal accounting information for planning, controlling, and evaluating firms' operational decisions and personnel. The course integrates accounting with ideas from microeconomics, data analysis, decision analysis, finance, operations management, and organizational behavior.

This course is designed for students committed to actively and intentionally engaging in leadership development. The goal is to increase students' capacity to lead others through the practical, hands-on application of leadership concepts both inside and outside of the classroom.