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.

Learn to 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 consists of 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. All of the cases involve current situations, and much of the class material is “raw,” consisting of financial filings, data sets, news reports, company material, and other primary source data.

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. We compare countries’ economic structure and performance over time and consider models in which the choices of private and public agents interact to produce aggregate outcomes in response to policy or economic shocks.

The performance of virtually every modern organization depends on the effectiveness of   groups and teams within it. Hence, those who lead and manage organizations need to be  able to design high-performing teams and create the conditions that enable them to   produce creative or innovative solutions to problems, make good decisions, and deliver  high-quality products, services, or experiences—all in a timely, efficient, and sustainable  fashion. Moreover, the organizational context and design of the teams must also enhance  the capabilities of the team and its members for future assignments. This course has two basic objectives: to introduce student to the core knowledge that will help them to effectively lead, manage, and function in task-performing groups and teams. These include conceptual frameworks for understanding group dynamics, diagnosing performance problems, and designing appropriate interventions. Second, to help  students develop the practical skills needed to apply the conceptual frameworks in their own teams and organizations. An intellectual understanding of theories of team effectiveness is of little use without a visceral understanding of group dynamics and the skills necessary to put these ideas into action. A manager’s knowledge of principles of groups and teams must be paired with opportunities to apply these concepts concretely the practical experience of “doing.” 

This class 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 including and emphasizing linkages to organizational behavior and workforce management, strategy, accounting, finance, and marketing. At its heart, this course is about using 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 your 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.

This course 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.

The purpose of this course is to enhance 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.

This course 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.  

Business is an activity in which parties exchange goods or services for valuable consideration. This course examines the ethical dimensions of such activities. We will give little focus to empirical questions (such as, “Does ethical business pay?”) or descriptive questions (such as, “Why do people engage in unethical behavior?”). Rather, most of the focus will be on learning tools for reasoning about what is ethical and unethical in 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 we use for reasoning about right and wrong through discussion and debate about the readings.

In this course, we will develop a broad approach for evaluating the prospects for firm profits. We will look at many firms across a broad range of markets. We will spend some time on managerial and behavioral issues and/or institutional details – but keep in mind that the more granular we get, the more the information applies only in restrictive scenarios. We will derive the principles we apply mainly from microeconomic theory. As such, potential answers to questions posed in class will be subjected to the rigor of economic analysis to test their validity and applicability.

It is important to recognize upfront that this class cannot be as perfectly organized as the outline suggests. This is not accounting or statistics that begin with core, universally accepted principles, and then build to harder problems and applications.  Instead, strategy is “messy” throughout, and we will be applying new tools and concepts to answer questions that arise throughout the course.  A clean linear approach would deliver the false promise that this material works like a tool.  This material is a lens that improves your analytical reasoning skills – you will be able to describe business situations in a more comprehensive, logical, and structured way.  However, in strategy, there is no equivalent of the option pricing formula.  Strategic analysis is ambiguous, and to present it any other way is disingenuous.

This course focuses on financial decision-making from the perspective of inside the corporation or operating entity. 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.

The course builds on the basic tools and theory from Sourcing and Managing Funds and extends them to address more complex (and practical) issues in valuation, capital structure, and financial transactions.

Building on the concepts and material from several core courses, 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.

The vocabulary and skills developed in the course are essential for managers (or their consultants) seeking to better understand organizations' internal operations. During the course, students will learn to identify and synthesize relevant information from internal accounting systems to make decisions and evaluate performance. These skills are valuable and applicable in many settings, including consulting, finance, marketing, operations, and strategy.

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

The course has two parts. In part one, students will learn foundational concepts that facilitate leadership development for themselves and others. These include creating an environment that supports development, giving and receiving feedback for goal setting, using coaching as an action-oriented approach to achieving goals, and exploring effective and innovative ways to overcome barriers to growth and development. Part two will focus on building specific leadership capacities to further deepen your ability to lead. Topics include resilient leadership, communication, and conflict competence. Additionally, students will partner with a peer and professional coach to build on in-class learning and work toward achieving leadership development goals.

In the age of Big Data, companies have access to data about markets, products, customers, and much more. When deciding on strategic issues such as pricing, advertising or targeting these data can be very valuable to companies if used correctly. This course will provide you with the tools and methods that will allow you to leverage such a rich data to help shape a marketing strategy from a quantitative perspective. While students will employ quantitative methods in the course, the goal is not to produce experts in statistics; rather, students will gain the competency to interact with and manage a data scientist team. In other words, we aim to develop working knowledge of data analysis, which is necessary for managers & executives in the age of Big Data. The course uses a combination of lectures, cases, and some data analytic exercises to learn the material.

Organizations aggregate individual efforts towards a goal. Organizations may take multiple shapes and forms to coordinate and motivate individuals. In this course, we overview the major forms in which organizations are designed. Besides analyzing the classic forms of organization design, this course puts an emphasis on novel opportunities and challenges that have emerged due to recent processes such as globalization, network economies, the Internet, big data, or crowdsourcing. The class will be highly interactive, with case discussions and in-class debates.

This course builds on the mini-course of game theory taught in the core. The goal is to further enhance our ability to think strategically and use game theory to analyze real-life business situations. In the first part of the course, we will briefly review and further develop the basic concepts such as Nash equilibrium and backward induction, and then introduce new concepts to study repeated games and cooperation, games with asymmetric information (including information disclosure, reputation, social learning and herding, etc.), and games with boundedly rational players. In the second part of the course, we will apply game theory to study market design such as matching systems, auctions, and online platforms. Class sessions will be a combination of lectures, in-class games, and case studies.

The aim is to improve decision making by considering relevant concepts and rules from two areas: taxation and financial reporting. The first half is focuses on firms' operations from the perspective of taxes and business strategy. This part is designed to give you the tools to identify, understand, and evaluate tax issues related to firm operations and tax planning opportunities. The second half focuses on financial reporting. The emphasis is less on rules, more on concepts and building a framework.  The discussion for each topic will begin with the financial economics that influence decisions, then describe the reporting rules, and conclude with ways to read financial reports to infer the underlying events.

This course provides students with an opportunity to explore being a CEO, owner, and/or entrepreneur of an emerging small or medium enterprise.  The course will examine operational, organizational and financial issues that are prevalent in developing small and medium businesses.  Cases will examine startups, acquired companies, family businesses and sponsored businesses (private equity owned).  Not-for-profits will also be considered.  The course will focus on the developing and adolescent stages of the business– beyond start up and prior to maturity or exit.  The size of the businesses will roughly be $2m to $100m in annual revenue.  Students will discover that organizations of this size can be resource constrained, lack infrastructure and will require innovative and creative solutions and strategies to grow and create value. The general nature of the course will give students a complete view of the enterprise and an understanding of what choices can be made to grow the enterprise, improve the enterprise, finance the business and create value.  The course will generally consist of three modules: The first will focus on leaders fixing and repairing troubled enterprises. The second will center on growing and developing the business.  The final module will explore the leader and CEO’s role in the business and the leader’s development and style.

This course will enhance the legal competency of EMBA students through a survey of critical legal and regulatory issues affecting organizations. The course aims to sharpen legal instincts and to provide students with knowledge and skills that will enable them to ascertain and avoid legal risks, identify competitive opportunities, and contribute to long-term organizational performance. Over the course of the semester, we will study the basic legal framework applicable to several significant subject matters and apply what we learn to real-world cases. No prior legal training will be assumed and an effort will be made to include legal subject matters beyond those covered in other parts of the management curriculum.