Core Curriculum

This course is designed to get students to the next level in their careers. The assumption is that their careers have peaked at the point where their technical expertise and IQ can take them; their future success requires getting the ordinary people around them to do extraordinary things. Students will take away practical tools for improving their ability in influencing, negotiating and leading changes in their organizations. Emphasis is on the practical. Many of the principles are demonstrated using classroom experiments. The final project requires students to apply course concepts to an ongoing challenge in their current work environment.

Designed to develop an understanding of accounting principles for users of accounting information. The course looks at how users of financial information interpret accounting reports when making business decisions. The emphasis is on profitability concepts and performance evaluation. Coverage is not restricted to the existing U.S. model but includes a broad discussion of measurement issues and alternative country practices.

Foundations of valuation is an introductory finance course required for all MBA students. It is designed to cover those areas of finance that are important to all managers, whether they specialize in finance or not. At the end of the course, you will be familiar with the most common financial instruments (stocks, bonds, options) and the methods to value them. More specifically, we will cover the following topics: 1. General framework for valuation (present value formula) 2. Bond and bond valuation (spot rates, yield to maturity, duration, convexity) 3. Stocks (stock valuation, dividend growth model) 4. Basic concepts of risk and return and the CAPM 5. Options (Black-Scholes formula) The course will be a mix of lectures and cases. Students are expected to come prepared to class since the course relies on several in-class exercises students will solve in excel.

Introduces students to 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.

This course is about the determinants of firm performance. It develops an explanation for why some firms perform better than others, and presents the analytical tools required to formulate successful strategies. Students will learn to analyze firms' competitive environments and to design a strategy that specifies appropriate long-term goals for a corporation, the businesses in which it will compete, how it will serve customers better than its competitors, and the capabilities that will be required in the service of these objectives. Learning is primarily through discussion of cases and articles with supporting short lectures and written assignments.

This course’s objective is to give you insight into how markets function. The decisions made by individual managers and consumers generate the fundamentals of market supply and demand, governing the prices and quantities sold in all economic transactions. As a manager seeking to maximize firm value, understanding your market(s) is crucial to achieving your goals. The first part of the course examines how managers make day-to-day decisions about running their businesses when their product is sold in a market that works efficiently. It will also address what types of industries are most likely to be efficient, either by default (commodities such as wheat and copper) or by design (electricity markets).

The second part of the course examines the decision making process when, for various reasons, a firm has market power. This refers to all situations where an individual firm has a direct influence on the market price of the product. We will discuss how managers can use this influence to generate firm value and set out situations in which managers can try to increase their market power. We will also use the tools developed along the way to understand the implications of market failure and some public policy solutions to economic inefficiency. Managerial economics is an important component of the MBA program. Its focus on how individuals make optimal decisions in different circumstances underpins much of both the core and elective curriculum. Our experience in prior years is that much of the material is intuitive, but much is not. The generality of the frameworks – combined with practical industry applications – will help you think about all the different kinds of markets you will encounter throughout your careers.

Corporate finance is an introductory course required for all MBA students. It is designed to cover those areas of finance that are important to all managers, whether they specialize in finance or not. At the end of the course, you will be able to value a firm. To reach this goal, the course covers the following topics: 1. Introduction to frameworks for firm valuation (enterprise DCF and multiples) 2. Multiple valuations 3. Free cash flows (definition, projections) 4. Residual value 5. Weighted average cost of capital 6. Optimal capital structure The course will consist of approximately one‐half lecture and one‐half in‐class case discussions, for which students should prepare carefully. The course aims to provide students with an understanding of sound theoretical principles of finance and the practical environment in which financial decisions are made.

This course is about modeling and how computer models can support managerial decision making. A model is a simplified representation of a real situation and modeling is the process of developing, analyzing and interpreting a model in order to help make better decisions. Models can be invaluable tools in managing and understanding the complexity and risk inherent in many business problems. As a result, models have become an increasingly important part of business at all levels from daily operations to strategic decision making.

Our emphasis is on models that are 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. We use spreadsheets and the tools Solver and Crystal Ball to implement, solve and analyze the models that we develop.

The aim of the course is to help students become intelligent users and consumers of these models. To this end, the course will cover the basic elements of modeling – how to formulate a model and how to use and interpret the information a model produces. The course emphasizes “learning by doing” so that students will be expected to formulate, solve, and interpret a number of different optimization and simulation models using Excel spreadsheets. An important theme in the course is to understand the appropriate use of models in business and the potential pitfalls from using models incorrectly or inappropriately.

Marketing activity is the engine that creates value in a business. It provides the focus for interfacing with customers and the source of intelligence about customers, competitors and the general environment. Further, marketing focuses on the long-run relationship of a company to its customers as well as on short-run sales. Thus marketing is critical to the revenue and profit streams for a company. This course emphasizes the role of marketing in creating value for customers, which in turn creates value for owners, shareholders and employees.

These courses explore the fundamentals of national competitiveness, productivity and growth. It studies the forces that determine production, consumption, savings and investment. It introduces the problem of variable foreign exchange rates and their impact on policy, performance and finance. It explores the complex relationships among government policies and private-sector performance in a global setting.

This course provides a fundamental understanding of manufacturing and service operations and their role in the organization. Surveys a wide range of operations topics, including process flow analysis, supply chain management, capacity planning, facilities location, and total quality management. Deals with 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 the firm.