Our core curriculum immerses executives in a blend of business theory and real-world practice.
The EMBA structure: First-year EMBA students are divided into clusters, made up of 30 to 70 students who take every core course together. Clusters are further broken into learning teams of five or six students with diverse professional backgrounds. From the start, this structure fosters an environment of cross-disciplinary collaboration.
During your first year, you gain an in-depth mastery of the academic disciplines and applied functional areas necessary for every business leader’s success.
Here are the core courses:
Corporate Finance
Examine how firms can create value for shareholders by formulating strategies that use finance as a crucial competitive weapon. Topics include discounted cash flow models, risk and return, capital asset pricing model, capital market efficiency, capital structure and the cost of capital, dividend policy, and leasing.
Financial Accounting
Develop an understanding of accounting principles, from a user’s perspective. Learn how users of financial information interpret accounting reports when making business decisions. Emphasis is on profitability concepts and performance evaluation. Discussion includes the existing U.S. model and, more broadly, measurement issues and alternative country practices.
Managerial Statistics
Explore basic concepts in probability and statistics of relevance to managerial decision-making. Topics include basic data analysis, random variables and probability distributions, sampling distributions, interval estimation, hypothesis testing and regression. Numerous examples are chosen from quality-control applications, finance, marketing, and management.
Managerial Economics
In this course, we first examine how managers make day-to-day decisions when a product is sold in a market that works efficiently. We look at industries likely to be efficient — either by default (commodities, such as wheat and copper) or by design (electricity markets). Second, we examine the decision-making process when a firm has market power (when it has direct influence on the product’s market price). We discuss how managers can use this influence to generate firm value and increase market power. We use specific tools to understand the implications of market failure and examine public policy solutions to economic inefficiency.
Markets and the Economy
This course focuses on how firms relate to the broader economic environment, and it serves as a bridge in the economics sequences between Managerial Economics and Global Economic Environment. In Managerial Economics we analyzed decisions based on information specific to the individual firm, such as cost and demand, and the strategic interaction between a small number of firms when those firms wield market power. In this course we expand the analysis to the broader economic environment in which multiple firms are operating simultaneously, and we focus on how the economic environment affects business decisions.
Strategy Formulation
Why do some firms perform better than others? Examine the determinants of firm performance, and master the analytical tools required to formulate successful strategies. Learn how to analyze a firm’s competitive environments, then design a strategy that specifies long-term goals, the businesses with which it will compete, how it will serve customers better than its competitors, and the required capabilities for meeting its objectives. Instruction involves cases and articles, short lectures, and written assignments.
Leadership and Organizational Change
How do you get to the next level of your career? The assumption is that careers peak at a point where technical expertise and IQ meet. Thus, future success requires getting ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Learn practical tools for improving your ability to influence, negotiate, and lead changes in organizations. With emphasis on the practical, many principles are demonstrated using classroom experiments. The final project requires students to apply course concepts to an ongoing challenge in their current work environment.
Marketing Strategy
Marketing activity — the engine that creates value in a business — is critical to a company’s revenue and profit streams. Examine the role of marketing in creating value for customers, which, in turn, creates value for owners, shareholders, and employees. Discover how marketing can provide the focus for interfacing with customers, as well as be a source of intelligence about customers, competitors, and the general environment. Explore the impact of marketing on a company’s long-term relationship to customers, as well as on short-term sales.
Operations Management
Gain a fundamental understanding of the role of manufacturing and service operations within organizations. The course surveys a wide range of operations topics, including process flow analysis, supply chain management, capacity planning, facilities location, and total quality management. We address these topics through a managerial, applications-oriented perspective. The course is integrative in nature, emphasizing the fit and relationship of operations with other functions of a firm.
Business Analytics
Learn how modeling — and computer models — can support managerial decision-making. Covering the basic elements, emphasis is on “learning by doing” — thus, formulating, solving, and interpreting various optimization and simulation models using Excel spreadsheets. We discuss the importance of using models appropriately in business and the potential pitfalls from using models incorrectly or inappropriately.
Emphasis is on models widely used in diverse industries and functional areas, including finance, operations, and marketing. Applications include advertising planning, revenue management, asset-liability management, environmental policy modeling, portfolio optimization, public health planning, and corporate risk management, among others.
Global Economic Environment
Explore the fundamentals of national competitiveness, productivity, and growth. Study the forces that determine production, consumption, savings, and investment. These two courses introduce the problem of variable foreign exchange rates and the impact on policy, performance, and finance. We also consider the complex relationships among government policies and private-sector performance in a global setting.
Please note: Every term, the core courses are taught by different professors, each of whom is uniquely prepared to teach the assigned courses. The professors and syllabi linked above are samples of what may be offered in a given term.