Year 2: Advanced Management & Electives

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. The course spends time on managerial and behavioral issues and/or institutional details, and derives the applied principles 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.

“It’s all about who you know.” From this familiar phrase, it seems intuitively clear that successful management of social networks is critical. Unfortunately, our intuition often does not take us far beyond this basic idea, and as a result, networks can impede—rather than facilitate—the realization of our goals. Thus, this course has two central goals: (1) to identify what kinds of networks facilitate personal and organizational success, and (2) to understand when we can (and cannot) achieve valuable ties that provide such strategic advantages. Students will be expected to actively participate in class discussions, especially those involving real-world cases that highlight both the value and limitations of social networks. Assessment is based on individual reflection memos and a final group project.

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.

Risk is a fundamental factor in management decisions across industries and sectors. This interdisciplinary EMBA course examines how managers identify, measure, and manage risk in three domains: financial markets and asset management, sustainability and climate, and health care. Students will see common risk concepts—operational risk, market risk, regulatory risk, climate risk, innovation risk, and reputational risk—applied in very different institutional settings.

Generative AI represents a fundamental shift in how organizations create, analyze, and make decisions. Unlike previous waves of AI focused on prediction and classification, generative AI produces language, ideas, images, code, and structured reasoning—touching every function where knowledge work occurs.

This course equips managers with the strategic frameworks and applied fluency to navigate this shift. When production becomes cheap, the organizational bottleneck shifts to orchestration: interpreting, integrating, and deciding what to do with what AI produces. The course develops three capabilities—the technical fluency to understand what AI does, the evaluative judgment to know when to trust it, and the organizational vision to lead through it.

By the end of this course, students will be able to evaluate GenAI opportunities with both strategic clarity and technical grounding, design GenAI-augmented workflows, assess risks and failure modes, and articulate coherent GenAI strategies to executives, boards, and teams.

Private equity (“PE”) has often summarized value creation simply as leverage + multiple expansion. In practice, consistent outperformance depends on repeatable value creation systems: commercial acceleration, operating model improvement, talent and incentives, digital enablement, risk management, and (increasingly) sustainability as a strategic and operational lever.

This course equips students to underwrite, execute, and measure a value creation plan — and to do so in a way that integrates levers such as sustainability, technology, and value creation through control or minority positions into investment judgment and post-close execution.

This course will provide an introduction to the economics of healthcare markets with a focus on understanding what is inefficient, what reforms and innovations might make things better and how strategic interactions among firms impact profits, health outcomes, and social welfare. Topics covered will include: measuring the value of health and medical care; the role of health insurance and competition among insurers; assessing healthcare delivery facilities such as hospitals, nursing homes and retail clinics; whether pharmaceutical prices are too high and whether we should purchase pharmaceuticals from other counties; lessons from behavioral economics about the role of imperfectly informed consumers; and the impact of the Affordable Care Act on health care in the US.

This course is designed to introduce students to challenges and pitfalls of financing new enterprises. Broadly speaking, we can think of entrepreneurial financing decisions in terms of a life cycle. The cycle begins with identifying opportunities and refining the business plan, moves to marshaling resources to take advantage of these opportunities and executing the business plan, and ends with harvesting the venture's success. Accordingly, the course is divided into three distinct sections:

• Identifying and Valuing Opportunities: Will this idea make or lose money? What must happen for this venture to succeed? Are these people the right people for the job? This section will focus on identifying good ideas, separating them from bad ideas, and in general, valuing the asset side of the balance sheet.
• Financing Alternatives: Which sources of funds offer the most attractive terms? This section will focus on the liabilities and net worth side of the balance sheet and will study how various financial contracts affect the incentives of financiers and entrepreneurs. We will also focus on alternative funding sources, such as joint ventures, corporate venture capital, and strategic alliances.
• Harvesting Opportunities: How do entrepreneurs and early-stage investors exit their investments so that they can move on to the next opportunity?

An in-depth course on the use of alternative investments in the institutional portfolio. A succession of asset classes will be studied using current academic and practitioner research. Students will study portfolios in the spirit of the Alternatives model and address the range of institutional issues raised by the use of illiquid, new or sophisticated investments. Each week we will discuss current research on the asset class, possibilities and challenges that it represents. Each class will have a case for discussion. The course will delve into these topics through in- class discussion. Please keep these multiple perspectives in mind for discussion in the course.

Finance can be likened to the circulatory system of the global economy, and we will focus on the past, present and future of that system. The course is designed to deal with questions such as these: What is the global financial system and how does it work? What are the pressures on that system including market, regulatory, political and social dynamics? What are the key challenges to that system? How can the system be strengthened?

In this course we are defining the global financial system (GFS) as encompassing central banks, commercial banks, and other financial institutions such as asset managers and private equity firms, financial regulators and international organizations. Thus we will cover subjects such as the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, Goldman Sachs and the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, the Carlyle Group and the BlackRock Investment Management Co., the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the Financial Stability Board, the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund.

We will take a broad view of the GFS including its history, its geopolitical framework, its economic foundations and its legal underpinnings. We will consider the GFS as a critical public good in the same way that clean air is a public good. We will look at a number of other key issues such as how the GFS deals with economic growth, economic and financial stability, distributional questions, employment issues, and long-term investments in infrastructure. We will discuss how new technologies are affecting several of the biggest issues in global finance. We will examine the GFS as a large-scale complex network, thereby compelling us to see it in an interconnected and multidisciplinary way. The emphasis will be on the practice of global finance more than the theory.

The course provides a broad overview of quantitative investment management, focusing on the application of finance theory to the issues faced by portfolio managers and investors in general. Topics include asset allocation, asset pricing models such as the capital asset pricing model and arbitrage pricing theory, performance evaluation, and an introduction to the use of derivatives for risk hedging. These tools provide a disciplined way of thinking about investment decisions, while simultaneously framing how we think about the historical performance of markets.

This course discusses how information on sustainability can be incorporated into investment portfolios. Sustainability-related objectives are important for investors representing trillions of dollars and may affect their portfolios’ risk and return. We will consider ways investors can articulate their financial and non-financial portfolio goals, as well as the potential for sustainability-minded asset owners to impact the companies they invest in. The course will blend academic research, case studies from investment practice, and outside speakers.

It used to be common to speak of the "high-tech sector" of the economy, but increasingly information technology is transforming how almost every market works: finance has been transformed by algorithmic trading and bitcoin, ridesharing is changing the nature of public transportation, Amazon is revolutionizing logistics and Airbnb is now the most valuable accommodation provider in the world. This transformation, which has been led by a series of start-ups and newly-dominant technology companies, inherently combines technical and economic aspects, as entrepreneurs take advantage of the potential of technology to facilitate exchanges that were previously infeasible.

This course analyzes the economics of innovation and the effects of artificial intelligence on business strategies. Topics include the economics of price discrimination (market segmentation, personalized pricing; subscription models), dynamic pricing, personalized bundling, searching costs and recommender systems, intellectual property (IP) rights, patent races, licensing and litigation, networks and standards. It also focuses on the characteristics of sharing economy (Uber, Airbnb, etc.), as well as the effect of AI on retail, pricing, online advertising, and other industries.

This course is designed to establish a common foundational understanding of business sustainability for EMBA students as they enter their second year of study. The course will show why sustainability needs to be integrated into all business disciplines that drive systemic change across key economic systems. The course will introduce a broad set of tools, frameworks, standards, guidelines and regulations that are in practice today to 1) identify stakeholders and the macro and scientific trends that impact business models and innovation, 2) tools to identify impacts and dependences on nature and society, 3) management accounting tools to support business decision making, 4) standards, frameworks, and regulations on disclosure.

These tools will demonstrate how embracing sustainability in a strategic way can be a driver to value preservation and creation. The course is designed to link sustainability to key business drivers and is therefore relevant for any potential investor, corporate manager, entrepreneur, or consultant. An overarching theme of the course is that we are each change agents for sustainable business, but in order to be effective, we must understand the nature of the needs, contextualize the challenges, understand the levers of action, and communicate clearly, acknowledging our own biases and assumptions.

The course begins by reviewing the history of corporate sustainability. We will frame the challenges that businesses face under the umbrella of sustainability – from climate change and biodiversity to human rights, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the future of work. This will be reviewed in the context of Planetary Boundary Science and Social Foundations. We will look at global mega-trends from credible sources such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), what they mean for business and how social norms are developing around the appropriate role of business today and in the future. We will explore the tools and frameworks that are available today to help businesses make sense of sustainability with deep dives into tools for internal management and decision making and tools for external disclosure and stakeholder engagement.

The course will also examine the differences between a leader and a sustainability leader and the role of followership, courage and diversity of thought. The course will seek to make the content come alive with input, debate, and presentations from sustainability leaders in business, consulting and standard setters.

The healthcare delivery system is made up of many organizations from large hospitals to small private practices. The operations of these organizations are complex as they involve many highly trained professionals with a wide range of specializations, sophisticated and expensive technology and customers (patients) with diverse needs all in an environment that is increasingly cost sensitive. At the same time quality is multidimensional and hard to measure. In this course we study concepts and tools that can increase the efficiency and quality of healthcare delivery processes. We will explore questions of capacity planning, scheduling and process design in healthcare both for in-patient and out-patient settings.

The goal of this course is to prepare you to be able to analyze a healthcare delivery process and determine how well it is functioning and how it could be improved. At the same time, you should be able to see how the processes and your improvements to it fit into a business model for the organization without losing sight of a concern for quality of care.

This course provides an in-depth exploration of venture capital investing in the healthcare sector. Through didactic sessions led by venture capitalists coupled with case studies, students will learn the fundamentals of investing in early stage private companies across multiple healthcare subsectors (e.g., biotech/life sciences, healthcare IT, healthcare services). Key investing topics covered in the course include: industry structure, investment thesis generation, due diligence, risk/return assessment, valuation, M&A and IPO exits, impact investing, and stakeholder management. Investing fundamentals are woven together with healthcare-specific themes, which include: life sciences innovation, healthcare/technology convergence, consumerization, value-based care, and environmental health. This is a capstone course that requires students to simultaneously apply multiple concepts from the core curriculum (e.g., fundamentals-based investing, innovation, fundraising, competitive landscapes, societal/regulatory considerations, probability modeling, team building) to analyze real-world investment opportunities.

This course develops the foundations of competitive strategy through a rigorous analytical lens, with a focus on technology-intensive markets. Using economic models, we examine how firms gain and sustain advantage in environments shaped by innovation, data, and network effects. Topics include pricing, product positioning, bundling, auctions, and entry strategies, with special attention to the strategic dynamics common in tech sectors. The course also explores the role of antitrust policy in shaping competitive behavior. While case studies provide applied context, emphasis is placed on frameworks and techniques that generalize across industries and guide strategic thinking in rapidly evolving markets.

Financial markets play an important role in driving macroeconomic outcomes. Similarly, macroeconomic stabilization policy has become increasingly central to understanding asset prices. This course delves into the rich set of interactions between financial markets, business cycles, and macroeconomic policy. We develop a framework to understand how asset prices and other shocks drive business cycles, and how central banks influence interest rates and asset prices to stabilize cycles and inflation. We touch upon other stabilization policies including quantitative easing and the lender of last resort. We apply our framework to recent macroeconomic events, such as the Great Recession, the Covid-19 recession and recovery, and the resurgence of inflation and bank runs. The course is appropriate for anyone trying to gain a macroeconomic perspective on financial markets.

Survey course that looks at demand-side and supply-side factors that influence the delivery of healthcare and health in the US. The course, inherently, challenges the student to consider the appropriate role of government in the US healthcare delivery system.

Course Format: The course will consist of six, three-hour class sessions. Pre-recorded videos will be assigned prior to each class covering the topic of the day, and slides will be distributed to go alongside these videos with updated information. Recommended readings related to each topic are also shared in the syllabus. The class will be driven by a discussion of the topic of the day, informed by the videos, slides, and readings. The latter three classes will feature final project presentations.

The aim is to improve decision making by considering relevant concepts and rules from two areas: financial reporting and taxation. As a result, the course is split into two parts that are taught by different faculty.

In the first three sessions, Jake Thomas will focus on financial reporting. The emphasis is less on rules, more on concepts and building a framework. In session 1, we consider two key topics: leverage and deferred compensation. The discussion for each topic begins with the financial economics that influence decisions, then we describe the reporting rules, and conclude with ways to read financial reports to infer the underlying events. In session 2, we develop the framework that links accounting information to value. In particular, we consider two key valuation ratios: Price to earnings (PE) and Price to book value (PB). In session 3, we study alternative approaches to estimating the cost of capital (debt & equity), and ways to reformat financial statements to properly consider internally generated intangibles (R&D, brands, customer acquisition, and so on).

Frank Zhang will then take over and consider 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. We begin by developing a conceptual framework for thinking about how tax rules affect business decisions. Once developed, the framework is brought to life by application to a variety of settings of particular interest to EMBA students, such as investment, compensation planning, corporate taxation, and international tax planning.

Game theory is the discipline that studies strategic interactions, i.e. the circumstances where the outcomes that you care about depend not just on your own actions but also on the actions of others. Many situations in business practices have this feature. They include, for instance, competition among a few major companies in an industry, the relationship between firms and consumers or regulators, and the interaction between employers and employees inside organizations. Game theory also has wide applications to sports, politics, militaries, and many other aspects in our society. Game theory aims to advise parties involved in strategic situations on the best course of action and to predict the outcome of strategic interaction. Game theory also helps improve the design of many market institutions such as auctions, school choices and online platforms.

This course builds on the mini-course of game theory taught in the core. Its goal is to further enhance your ability to think strategically and use game theory to understand and analyze real-life situations with strategic interactions, and to design game rules to achieve desired outcomes. In particular, the course emphasizes four themes for acquiring advantage in games:

• Identifying structures: Being able to identify the key elements of the situation is critical for strategic thinking.
• Selecting strategic moves: Changing the game being played to your advantage through credible commitments, threats, and promises.
• Exploiting hidden information: When to reveal information or not, and how to handle uncertainty about others’ information.
• Recognizing the limits of rationality: How to play when others may not be fully rational, and when others may be uncertain about your rationality.

The purpose of this course is to prepare you to manage a team focused on developing technological innovation in an era defined by Artificial Intelligence. This course exposes you to the dynamics of industries driven by rapid technological shifts, particularly the disruptive force of generative AI and foundation models, and trains you to think strategically about innovation, new product development, and deployment when traditional competitive advantages are being rewritten.

The course will focus on the most critical components and issues in global health in the era of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and post-COVID-19 healthcare, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and cost-effective innovative solutions. The course will examine the following to set a foundation for understanding global health issues:

• What is global health? 
• Who are the key global health actors? What are their roles?  
• The burden of disease, risk factors, and social determinants of health
• What are the key issues facing health systems in LMICs and how are countries seeking to address them?  
• Comparative health systems and health system reform – How have different countries, richer and poorer, sought to address key health system issues and what can we learn from their experience?  
• What are the constraints to the development of the diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines that are needed to meet the health needs of the poor in low- and middle-income countries?  
• What are some of the innovative approaches that have been taken to addressing global public goods in health?  
• Future promises and challenges in global health  

The course will also examine how one might apply the following approaches to addressing some of the most important issues noted above: 

• Community-based NGO-led efforts 
• Social and other forms of insurance 
• Public-private partnerships 
•  Product development partnerships 
• Innovative financing 
• Social entrepreneurship 
• Corporate social responsibility  

Regulation, financial pressure, politics and time have worked to evolve the field of business and sustainability over the last 30+ years. Whereas in previous decades, sustainability practitioners would establish the business case for addressing social and environmental risks and opportunities based on theory and generalized approaches to risk analysis, today money for sustainable assets is measured against the same criteria as any other investment. Moreover, management of assets to create positive environmental and social outcomes now entails the same controls and risk mitigation strategies that business uses to manage financial outcomes.

However, there are key differences in the information that we use to price and manage assets for sustainability compared to pure financial outcomes. Applying the techniques used to price and manage financial performance into the sustainability world also requires more expansive understanding of integrated risk.

This class attempts to build on the fundamentals of finance and management and apply them to business risks where we must optimize against both financial outcomes and social/environmental outcomes. In the first half of the course we will turn our attention to the management of environmental and social risk to protect the financial performance of an existing asset. Our focus will be on large corporations and the systems they use today to understand, measure, control and audit for social and environmental risks. This half of the class will culminate in an assessment of internalized and externalized risks and opportunities in the form of a Double Materiality Assessment.

The second half of the class dives into the financial risks associated with environmental and social challenges to business where we will model the price of an asset based on the accrual of that monetized risk to the asset.

This class is intended to be highly practical to anyone interested in either sustainable finance or corporate sustainability by providing the core concepts of business and sustainability and then building the tools used by investors and companies to price and manage environmental and social risks in the context of protecting financial value.

Natural resource constraints affect most, if not all, functional areas of the modern corporation. Many large companies are taking proactive approaches to managing these risks and capturing the opportunities they create. As such, they are increasingly expecting their employees to have a basic familiarity with the environmental and social, as well as the economic, megatrends affecting the resource systems on which they depend.

The course will introduce and examine the intersections between social phenomenon, health care delivery system incentives, technological advances, patient engagement, and health outcomes across groups in the United States. These concepts will be explored through course topics including data governance and quality measures, payment models, and behavioral health. The tension and synergies across prevailing frameworks will be illustrated. Opportunities to innovate and advance both population health and health equity will be highlighted and identified. The course will also anchor topics in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic which has highlighted and exacerbated stark health inequities.