Year 1: Our Integrated 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.

This course introduces the fundamental concepts of probability, which is the quantitative means by which we reason and communicate about uncertainty. In addition to providing some of the intellectual foundations for good critical thinking, it also lays the groundwork for application of probability and quantitative analysis in other courses.

This course introduces you to art of data analysis. We will cover confidence intervals, hypothesis testing and regression formally, intuitively and practically using a mixture of class lectures and hands-on applications. My hope is that you will find these tools useful both professionally and in your everyday life.

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 social power, influence, and persuasion are all keys to getting things done. This course is designed for individuals interested in building skills for using power in ways that are consistent with the global mission of SOM; to facilitate your role as a leader of business and society.

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.