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Course Descriptions
Curriclum is Subject to Change
First Year Courses
Values Based Leadership
This course provides students with a frame work in which to develop their own leadership style according to their personal value propostions.
Management of Organizations
The course begins with a brief overview of the course and an examination of organizational strategy. Next, we look at teams in organizations and some phenomena that occur as teams make decisions. We follow with an examination of how and why people react to organizational change and identify opportunities for enhancing the effective implementation of change. Two topics of critical importance to organizations in dynamic environments—organizational resizing and organizational sustainability—are explored next. This is followed by an examination of the less fortunate situation of organizations in crisis and decline. A brief introduction to the theories that provide direction for motivating organizational members effectively is provided next, along with a simulation that applies this knowledge and students’ work experience. Next, interpersonal conflict in organizations is examined, followed by exploration of critical globalization issues and the importance of culture to an organization. The course finishes with time devoted to corporate governance.
Contemporary Topics: Negotiations
Managers spend a substantial portion of their time (20 percent, according to one study) and energy negotiating and resolving conflicts with superiors, coworkers, subordinates, customers, competitors and suppliers. The bargaining, negotiation, and conflict resolution skills of managers in these situations can have an important impact on the outcomes received by ALL parties. Poorly conducted negotiations can reduce the value of settlements both to the individual manager and other parties, or result in no settlement at all.
The two primary goals of this contemporary topics course are: first, to provide students with an understanding of theory and concepts of the bargaining process and outcomes. These theories are both normative (how negotiations should occur), drawing from economics and decision theory, and descriptive (how negotiations actually occur), drawing from behavioral decision theory. Second, this course intends to provide students with the opportunity to apply theoretical concepts and develop bargaining skills through in class examples and discussion, and, most prominently, negotiating exercises and cases. Together, knowledge of and experience with negotiation and conflict resolution will be enhanced.
The course will provide students with an overview of choices available to managers in reporting corporate performance in financial statements. Topics include revenue recognition, inventory accounting, cash flow reporting, accounting for acquisitions, accounting for liabilities, disclosure issues, international differences in financial reporting, and financial statement analysis.
Economic Analysis for Managers
Managers regularly make choices, many of which are difficult. Economics logic often offers powerful and elegant insights into making those choices. A fundamental working knowledge of the firm's economic environment can improve both day-to-day managerial decision making and long-term strategic planning. The purpose of this course is to develop basic microeconomic concepts and apply them to issues of particular relevance to senior managers.
An introduction to the elements of marketing management, with particular focus on new product, pricing, distribution, and promotion decisions. The use of customer and competitive analysis as input to strategy decisions will be emphasized. Selected case studies from a variety of industry contexts will be used.
This course is designed to provide the student with an in-depth understanding of the role of management accounting information in the support of key strategic management issues and processes. Specifically, the course first starts with an in-depth presentation and understanding of Balanced Scorecard Reporting and the manner in which it supports strategic decision making. Next, we move downstream in the value chain and utilize activity-based costing to deal with strategic issues around customer mix and product distribution. Finally, we move upstream in the value chain to address important strategic issues of supplier relations, product design, and speed of product development. Again, all of these critical management issues are informed by managerial accounting information in the form of activity based costing.
The financial analysis of corporate decisions. The course develops the standard discounted cash flow framework, which is consistent with shareholder value maximization and Economic Value Added. This framework yields the techniques for analyzing both capital investment decisions and financing decisions. Emphasis is placed on an intuitive understanding of these techniques and their practical limitations.
The purpose of this module is to develop a simple model of the United States economy that can be used to analyze the current economic environment. First we review the goals and implementation of monetary and fiscal policy, the problems associated with inflation, and the methods for measuring the overall performance of the economy. Next, we develop a simple model of the U.S. economy and apply it to provide a brief overview of U.S. economic performance over the past 30 years. We then focus on current issues, including the surplus, social security, and the extraordinary recent economic robustness. The intent is to provide a basic framework to interpret analysis of current and future movements in interest rates, inflation, growth and unemployment.
Decisions, Information and Uncertainty
This model introduces varying approaches to strategy focusing especially on dynamic strategies, as the organization deliberately anticipates and makes use of repeated change under varying conditions of uncertainty. Organizational learning, including both knowledge creating and deployment, plays a crucial role.
Second Year Courses
Global Strategy Simulation
Global Tycoon is a computer-based competition conducted during the first week of class. Students and their teams “purchase” and operate a company over 3-1/2 days or 2-1/2 years in simulation time. Teams prepare in advance of the first week of classes by researching the resource web site; using the demo software and reading the software help system (especially the portion that talks about team members’ functional roles); talking with teammates to decide who will fill each role; and becoming familiar with the software and the competing companies.
This course is about managing people in organizations, and is designed for training future leaders. Based on research in organizational behavior and social psychology, the course focuses on studying motivational and leadership practices that have been proven to work in impacting individual and group performance in organizations. The main goals of the course are to: (a) discuss the science behind these practices, (b) demonstrate how they could be used to better understand, predict, and manage employee behavior at work, and (c) assess students’ motivation and leadership styles through psychometric scales.
Advanced Corporate Financial Management
This course examines in detail the basic decisions made by financial decision-makers. There is an emphasis on the formulation and implementation of financial solutions to corporate problems and opportunities. Topics include valuation models, options, corporate control, and mergers and acquisitions. The course will consist primarily of case discussions and analyses.
International Financial Management for Executives
This course is an application of finance principles to international business decisions with a particular emphasis on the interactions of finance and competitive strategy in a global context. The course starts with an overview of the recent developments in the world economy and financial markets. Then it focuses on the key issues in international financial management: exchange rate behavior and risk management, international tax strategy, cross-border investment decisions, international merger and acquisitions, joint ventures, project finance structuring the corporate finances in the global financial market, evaluation of assets subject to political risk.
The purpose of this course is to prepare executives to recognize, analyze and respond to legal issues arising in their everyday business lives. This includes familiarizing themselves with "legal jargon" through lectures followed by case analysis, presentations and discussions. We discuss legal process, business organizations, intellectual property, and business torts.
Global Economics for Executives
This is a particularly interesting period in which to study global economics. The U.S. economy, which was widely regarded as a miracle economy of the 1990s, appears to have hit the wall. Although economic growth has again picked up in recent quarters, job growth is lagging in this recovery. Is global competition in the form of international trade and services outsourcing responsible for the sluggish job growth? If so, would it be wise to adopt policies that reduce trade or outsourcing of service tasks by U.S. companies? Is the U.S. trade deficit something that threatens our future prosperity? Will the U.S. repeat its strong performance of the 1990s in the coming decade? What causes fluctuations in exchange rates and how do they impact the profitability of firms? What decisions can firms take to optimize their performance in a world of exchange rate uncertainty? Our goal is to show how economic models can help us understand the consequences of globalization, services outsourcing, and trade imbalances, with an emphasis in the second part of the course on exchange rates.
The course is concerned with the challenge of managing diversified and diversifying firms in global competitive environments. Cases coupled with readings will provide an understanding of resource identification, mobilization, exploration and exploitation through internal diversification, mergers and acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The course concludes with an executive network assessment of students’ personal resource bases and suggestions for augmenting those networks for personal strategic effectiveness. In project teams, students will also be tasked with developing and recommending a new business and corporate strategy to public company that serves as our class “client.”
The EMBA trip will expose students to the challenges, complexities and opportunities of formulating and implementing a strategy in emerging markets. Using the specific context of the trip destination, students will visit companies of varying size, nationality, and industry. Students will meet with the managers responsible for executing the companies' domestic and global strategies as well as gain insights into what life might be like as an expatriate in the particular locations that we visit.
This course will expose students to the concepts and challenges of the strategic marketing process. The central focus will be on the customer relations management (CRM) theme. Students will be in a position to approach strategic marketing problems with a strong and sound analytical approach. Specifically the course is designed to focus on effectively understanding customers, developing insight-based customer focused strategies on an on-going basis, and developing effective implementation strategies with an emphasis on analyses and results.
Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A)
It is estimated that between 50 and 70 percent of acquisitions fail to achieve pre-deal goals, or create substantial value for shareholders. This course provides a structured approach to M&A decision-making. Beginning with strategic issues of acquisitions and divestitures, target identification, financial considerations of valuation, deal structure, and pricing; students then consider subtleties of due diligence and negotiation, and the course concludes with closing and integration considerations. Cases include work on private and public deals, cross-border transactions, and hostiles. Alternatives to acquisition, such as alliances and joint ventures, are also discussed.